


Friendly Fire

by vrginsacrifice



Category: RuPaul's Drag Race RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Established Relationship, If Trixie and Katya starred as themselves (but not themselves), M/M, Multi, Uh that is what...I'm giving you???, in an alternate universe in which Nicolas Winding Refn directs a neon noir, set in the Grand Theft Auto universe...
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-25
Updated: 2018-11-11
Packaged: 2018-12-19 05:48:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 49,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11891313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vrginsacrifice/pseuds/vrginsacrifice
Summary: A neo-noir outlaw AU set in the “Grand Theft Auto” universe, in which Trixie and Katya are a couple of cross-dressing criminals down-on-their-luck and struggling to stay together. Can they reignite that old flame and land themselves One More Big Score? Buckle up for some super-charged, over-the-top, pulpy nonsense, from my id to your eyeballs.





	1. Los Santos is for Lovers

**Author's Note:**

> After much internal debate, I’ve made the executive decision to use ‘he’ when they’re out of drag and ‘she’ when in drag. All pronouns are a narrative indication of presentation, a suggestion rather than a declaration.
> 
> From the game franchise, I’ve only pulled some locations, brand names, and car models. Because GTA is a crazy, cheeky, satirical pulpy world and it's fun. (Like drag, right?) Trust me, you need absolutely no knowledge of the game to read this.

At one in the morning, a rickety Albany Primo pulls into the strip joint on Elgin Avenue. The car-frame rattles over the pocked pavement, sounding like it’s held together by little more than spit, string, and hope. There’s a busted tail-light and a smashed side-view and it’s more than three months behind on inspection. It’s a miracle that the LSPD hasn’t pulled either of them over for a quick and easy buck. (Then again, the pigs don’t often prowl their end of Los Santos.)

This piece of shit, which they ‘lovingly’ call Brenda, is a far cry from the cherries they used to drive—and it’s hard to forget the roar of a Vacca Pegassi barreling down the freeway or the mounting thrill of playing chicken with oncoming traffic.

But hey, this is it...This is the face of _Going Legit_ , for all that’s fucking worth.

The dash-lights flicker while the car idles in the parking space. Radio Mirror Park fuzzes over the tinny speakers. With over 200k on the odometer, Brenda’s gonna kick it real, real soon and how the fuck they’re gonna pay for a new one, God only knows. In a couple months, they might end up bartering for beans and using their holes for currency in the shanty town under the Olympic Expressway. But hey, at least they’ll be _Legit._  And it’s so close to The Vanilla Unicorn, it’ll be a shorter commute for Trixie.

Katya can see the flaming barrels from the parking space, can hear a couple hobos arguing with each other.

Give him a week or two, he could really run that place, y’know.

Sleeping in dumpsters, pissing in bottles, trading horror stories with the dregs of humanity...eh, Katya could handle that. Might even find it fun. Trixie though...Trixie’s always been kind of a priss. He’s always liked nice things, liked being comfortable. With everything in its place. With everything fully-realized, everything ‘just-so.’ Katya’s always liked that about Trixie: his clear vision, his staunch sense of self-worth, his way of cutting right to the chase with a strong arm and a girly little wink.

With a sleepy smile, Katya stifles a yawn. He shuffles around to the entrance of the club, nods to the bouncer, and shoulders through the double-doors. Inside, the low boom of the bass punches through Katya’s chest. It could rouse the living dead, which is convenient, considering Katya’s self-identified as a zombie for the past 48 hours _at least._

The Vanilla Unicorn is all pink and purple, disco lights and body glitter. The decor’s trapped in the late ‘80s and it always smells like cold cuts and cheap perfume. It’s tacky and trashy and deliciously rotten; so, Katya always feels right at home.

Juliet’s working the pole on the mainstage, moving like she’s really made of sugar, spice, and everything nice. Britney’s “Gimme More” blasts over the speakers.

(It’s always “Gimme More.”)

Her face still looks pretty good, considering the sweat’s fuzzing her eyeliner and her lips are suggestive of a sloppy backstage blowie, but no one’s _ever_ looking at Juliet’s _face._ So, Trixie’s artistry always goes unnoticed.

Trixie’s precise eye is wasted on a dump like The Vanilla Unicorn. Katya’s seen Trixie hotwire a Zentorno XA-21 in ten seconds flat. She’s seen Trixie snipe a goon dead-between-the-eyes at seven-hundred yards. (Lyudmila Pavlichenko, eat your heart out.) She’s watched Trixie add up money like a currency-counter, licking the edges of bloodstained bills, filing them into big _fat_ stacks.

Christ, when they had money! They were rolling in it, happy as two pigs in shit. And they blew it all on stupid crap like pink mimosas and designer sunglasses and cutesy artillery. They didn’t think of the end. Any end to their excess. Back then, the outlaw life was champagne and creme brulee, blood and guts and easy pay.

Back then, they were _immortal_ , bitch.

Katya always remembers a particular afternoon when he watched Trixie count up one of their scores. It was late August. Humid. The rotating desk fan fluttered the cash with each pass. Katya wrapped his arms around Trixie and settled his chin on his shoulder: tongue-out, grin manic, rocking his hips into the back of Trixie’s chair as he tallied it up. Watched as it grew from ten Gs to twenty.

To thirty.

Then to forty, fifty…

“Sixty,” Trixie finally breathed, staring at the sea of green, “That’s sixty.”

 _Sixty thousand dollars_.

All in a night’s work.

Katya wanted to stuff all that cash in his mouth, coat it in his saliva, make it _his_. He wanted to piss all over it. He wanted to bury it in a hole and _fuck it_.

Grinning, Katya wrapped a hand around the back of Trixie’s neck. He pulled in close, his forehead resting against Trixie’s temple, his teeth grazing the shell of his ear. “Wanna know what really makes me horny, Tracey?”

Trixie stared at the loot, resisting a smile. “Blood.”

“Cold, hard, _cash_ ,” Katya hissed, gripping his inner thigh, grinning at the way he trembled a little.

“Oh, honey,” Trixie said, meeting him eye-to-eye, their noses bumping together, “We have _that_ in common.”

Of all his scatterbrained memories of those two wild years, Katya still remembers that afternoon with a special fondness. He remembers the way the amber sunlight fanned through the blinds and made the dust motes glitter and dance in the light. The way it brightened the golden hue of Trixie’s skin, the warmth in his dark eyes, the obnoxious bubblegum lipstick staining his lips. The way he smelled of grease and sweat, of blood and Banana Boat. How Katya pulled him in and crashed their mouths together, all sloppy and giddy and ferocious, until Trixie did that thing he did and flipped the script, slowed it down, melted all of Katya’s edges, made him softer and _harder_ all at once.

Katya’s always loved that about Trixie—his bratty urban cowboy with all his secret, gentle dreams.

Katya remembers the erratic squeak of their old mattress and the sweet slick of sweat shining down the valley of Trixie’s spine. He remembers leaving a bite mark, red and adoring, wet with saliva, on the meat of Trixie’s fat ass. He remembers his eyes rolling back and his ecstatic shudder—collapsing on top of his lover, burrowing into the space between his ear and shoulder, babbling nonsense words. All that stupid stuff you say. All that breathless stuff.

And he remembers the way Trixie laughed, all blissed-out, and said, “Get off me, you idiot.” Katya remembers groaning, trying to lift himself; and how Trixie grabbed his bicep, pulled him back down, and murmured, “Wait. Not _yet_.”

Katya’s heart clenches whenever he thinks about it because he knows he thinks about it too often: How it used to be. How _they_ used to be.

It’s all different, now.

They talk different. They kiss different. They fuck different, when they find the time or energy to fuck at all. And Katya’s made the painful discovery that “I love you” sounds so much more meaningful after a brilliant hail of gunfire than after a cold pizza breakfast and a chaste little peck on the lips. He can see it brewing on the horizon: the accusations, the passive-aggression, the banal resentments. All the blithe little cruelties that they’ll start hurling at each other in time.

Because that’s normal people. That’s what normal people do, what normal people _are_.

By now, if they were some miserable straight couple, they would scheming to make a baby. Save the marriage. Like that _ever_ works.

Money can’t buy happiness. But it doesn’t hurt, bitch. It sure doesn’t hurt.

Nowadays, Trixie’s spending his evenings painting exotic dancers for ten bucks an hour and his afternoons folding ironic t-shirts at Suburban, while Katya’s teaching discount yoga to pilled-out housewives and manning the register at a sex-shop outside Chamberlain Hills, peddling double-ended dildos and cherry-flavored lube for a measly paycheck that barely covers their utilities.

But that’s Going Legit.

That’s what they agreed to do: earn money the old fashioned way. Lay low and abide the law, as much as possible for two felons on the run.

It’s a life of quiet routine, of impoverished domesticity. And it fucking blows. It’s sad and sexless and exhausting. It’s boring.

God, it’s so fucking boring.

It’s so fucking boring that he hardly recognizes the two of them, mired in the mundanity of it all, struggling just to get by.

It’s been so long since he’s seen Trixie as _Trixie_ , all dolled-up in an explosion of pink frills and big blonde hair. So long since he’s seen Trixie tote her glorious fuchsia bull-pup that’s gathering dust in a trunk somewhere.

Running a hand along his chin, Katya grimaces at the stubble rasping against his fingers, realizing how long it’s been since he’s been _Katya_. How long it’s been since he’s looked in the mirror and seen her long blonde hair, her glinting raccoon eyes, her bright red lips.

He misses that whore like crazy.

He misses _them_.

As Juliet wraps up her number, Katya scans the club for any sign of Trixie and finds none. So, he sidles up to the bar and lights up a cigarette. He no sooner gets a puff when it’s plucked from his lips and dropped into an old mug of Pißwasser.

“No smoking, baby. You know the rules,” the brunette bartender sing-songs. Except it’s not the usual girl, but one of the dancers. A popular one, too.

Sapphire. Or, Chloe, depending on who you ask and who you know.

“The fuck are you doing tending bar?”

It’s only then that Katya notices the sorry state of the bar-top: greasy glasses crowded together, sticky water-rings staining the wood, soggy dollar bills trapped beneath crumpled napkins.

She rolls her eyes. “Management caught me huffing nitrous in the toilet.”

“Again?”

“So, this is my punishment or whatever.”

Sapphire smiles and leans over the counter, snatching Katya’s stupid baseball cap off his head and fitting it onto her own.

“Didn’t anybody ever tell you not to share hats with dirty, _nasty_ , disease-riddled reprobates?”

Sapphire just shrugs. “I’ll take my chances.”

“Oh, I wasn’t talking about _me_.”

“Hardy har har,” she giggles, slapping the cap back on Katya’s head, flicking the brim. “What’s a _reprobater_ anyway?”

Katya grins. “You and me. That’s for sure.”

Sapphire smiles at that. “So, can I get you anything, _Dictionary Dot Com_?”

Katya yawns again, pulling his eyebrows with two fingers. “Um. I guess. Cranberry juice if you got it.”

She winks and turns to search for a bottle, her bustier riding up to reveal the cursive ‘Coke&Cock’ tramp stamp emblazoned between the dimples of her lower back. Sapphire’s always been a full-time slut living her life in the fast lane—killing time, killing brain cells, killing in the name of love—and Katya’s always respected that about her. She’s a kindred spirit.

Finally, with a triumphant grin, Sapphire sets down a glass of red juice.

A few stools down, an old slouch gives Katya a once-over, snorting at the pussy drink in his hand, as if to say: ‘What kind of man are you?’

And of course, the answer is: No kind of man you can ever imagine.

Katya tips the glass at him, lifts his eyebrows, and grins. “I’m on my period.”

The geezer’s startled snort would’ve made Katya crow with laughter if he weren’t so damn exhausted. With nothing to say, the slouch hunches his shoulders and looks back into his drink.

Giggling, Sapphire leans in. Her bedazzled coke-nail toys with the cuff of Katya’s jacket like that’ll actually _work._ But Katya can’t blame her for trying. Sapphire’s just doing what Sapphire knows and using what she’s got and he can’t really begrudge her that.

“Hey, so, um,” the stripper says carefully, “You’re not like...holding or anything are you, hon? ‘Cuz I need a pick-me-up _real bad_.”

Sympathetic, Katya sighs. “You know I’m not in the game anymore.”

“You should be, babe,” Sapphire says, and then rolls her eyes, “Your boyfriend’s _always_ bitching about he doesn’t see you and times are tough and blah-blah-blah. My new man, T-Rex, hangs with The Snakes on Grove Street. I can get him to put in a good word for you guys. If you want.”

Katya’s heard of The Snakes, how they pushed the Squirrelfriends out of Grove Street. Though he doesn’t know much else, Katya’s still glad the Squirrelfriends got what was coming to them.

During their heyday, Trixie and Katya ran a few jobs for those goons. The Squirrelfriends always paid well and on time; but their leadership never really understood the specific terms of Trixie and Katya’s employment. What they advertised. And how serious they were about upholding their impartiality. They were Mercenaries for Hire. They were Hitman Hookers. One and done. Loyal only to each other, beholden to nothing but the great American dollah.

But The Squirrelfriends started ordering hits on them when they began working with their competitors. Long story short, The Squirrelfriends and their unending stream of rancid hypocritical bullshit drove Trixie and Katya out of business and underground. Reduced them to _this_.

They went from career criminals, from two of the baddest bitches in herstory, to a couple of nelly queens with barely a pot to piss in.

(God, if Chachki could see him now...the things that gila monster would say….)

Katya’s nails dig into his palm, enough that it hurts. When he downs his drink, he wishes for the thousandth time this year that he’d never quit the good stuff. Any of that good stuff.

“No,” he finally sighs, trying to convince himself more than Sapphire, “I’m done. We can’t. I promised him and all of that.”

Meanwhile, Katya’s trying to leash every instinct he has to nose his way back in. To find _any_ way back in. He wants to play the game. He wants it right now more than anything. And Sapphire sees right through it.

Smirking, the brunette leans in close again. She smells like marshmallow body lotion and her eyes are glassy, the mirror-balls reflecting through the pink of her waterline.

“Listen, killer, I won’t tell if you don’t,” she says, taking Katya’s hand and flipping it over. She licks the tip of a cheap ballpoint pen and presses it into the fleshy part of Katya’s palm. It’s a phone number. “Just think about it, ok? It’s like...a real bummer seeing you this way, y’know.”

“Um? Hey.”

Katya startles at the sound of Trixie’s voice and the two of them break apart quickly.

Trixie shuffles over, toting his make-up case, glancing between them with a look of mild confusion. Sapphire just winks and goes back to her business, leaving Katya’s spot by the bar to polish some glasses with a dirty rag.

“Hey, you,” Katya says all-too-brightly, closing his incriminating hand into a loose fist. It burns like a fresh brand. Standing all-too-quickly, Katya almost catches his ankle in the rung of the stool and stumbles a little.

Trixie chuckles. “Easy, grandpa, wouldn’t want you to break a hip.”

Katya nervous-laughs.

To the casual observer, Trixie would look a little ridiculous. He’s got heart-shaped glasses perched on his head, a fanny pack strapped around his waist, and an outfit consisting of athletic shorts and a battered pink tank-top that proclaims ‘Los Santos is For Lovers.’ Still, Katya gets a little giddy just from looking at him, wants to rail him hard and fast even looking like _this_ ; and if that isn’t the most sincerest, most primal, indication that he’s still _In This_ with Trixie, Katya doesn’t know what else is.

Trixie gestures toward Sapphire, who’s prodding an old man snoring into his drink at the far end of the bar. “Things getting so bad that you’re picking up chicks now?” Trixie jokes. It falls flat. And Katya can hear his voice break a little, can hear an uncomfortable ounce of insecurity that makes him feel like a five-alarm piece of shit.

“You know she reads palms?” Katya lies, pointing a thumb over his shoulder, “Apparently, I have a broken life line. But! A Ring of Solomon, which is supposed to be good luck. Maybe I can cash in real soon and get us that extra cup of guac at Taco Bomb.”

He’s a good liar. Always has been. Always will be. A lifetime of the hustle and grind can do that for a girl: nurture a natural ability and affinity for blowing smoke and hot air. But Katya always seems to bungle it with Trixie. Because he hates lying to Trixie. Detests it. Avoids it at all costs. And Trixie knows that. Trixie usually calls him out on it, holds him accountable, holds him to a higher standard than anyone ever has and probably ever will.

He doesn’t tonight. Trixie either lets it go or is too bushwhacked to notice any of Katya’s tells. Katya doesn’t know whether to feel relieved or disappointed.

On the ride home, Trixie slumps into the passenger seat. He picks at the stuffing spilling through a patch of duct-tape and rests his head against the window. Each exhale of breath fogs up the glass.

They share a laugh when “Gimme More” starts up on the radio again. Trixie’s hand shoots out, spinning the dial to ‘0.’

“Girl, it follows me everywhere,” Trixie sighs, “Just when I think I’ve escaped it, there it is again. On Non-Stop Pop FM.”

“Sounds like herpes.”

Trixie chuckles. “You would know.” He threads his hand with Katya’s and they slip back into silence, listening to the jingle-jangle of Brenda’s crappy AC unit.

Katya peers over the steering wheel to watch lavender forks of heat lightning flash across the sky and follows the puffy orange street lights lacing the roads, guiding them home. Their shitty studio apartment teeters on top of the Smoke on the Water dispensary down on the Vespucci strip. It always stinks of sea-salt and fresh-cut bud but Katya loves Vespucci Beach: Its colorful frenetic energy. In the morning, it’s swarmed with slurry burn-outs and dopey-eyed beach-bums, big bloated tourists and their sticky sand-coated children. But right now, during the witching hour, it’s empty. Gone dark. Even over at the Pleasure Pier.

The two of them shuffle up the wooden scaffolding. The stairs creak with each conjoined step. They hang over each other like two drunk, codependent marionettes made of driftwood.

As Katya fumbles with the key to their door, Trixie presses a sleepy kiss under his ear. The contact makes him shiver a little.

“Don’t start something we can’t finish, mama,” he murmurs into Trixie’s scalp, knowing it’ll stop here.

(Because nowadays, it always stops here.)

Kicking the door closed, Katya doesn’t bother with the single bare-bulbed light dangling from the ceiling. He doesn’t investigate the funky smell of old Chinese wafting from the fridge or the _plip-plop-plip_ of their leaky sink. The motivation is just not there. It’s non-existent.

Trixie shucks off his clothes and collapses onto their dumpy bed. When Katya does the same, Trixie wraps his arms and legs around him and draws him close. (Trixie says he likes being the big spoon because it keeps Katya from flailing around at night, because he likes his heat. Katya knows better.)

Trixie’s breath puffs against the nape of his neck, cool against his sunburn. The sea breeze rustles the blinds overhead and the sound of the water is a hush of white noise. The palms whisper while distant police sirens move in and move out, like a different kind of tide. The sirens should trigger some memories, shouldn’t they? Make him anxious. Or excited. They should thrill him in some way that they don’t. Not anymore.

“I hate this,” Katya whispers to Trixie, his voice shaking a little, “Don’t you hate this? I know you hate this. Don’t tell me you _don’t_ hate this.”

But he doesn’t get an answer. Trixie’s breath has already evened out, his grip loosening.

Katya stares into the dark of their apartment for a long time, until his eyes adjust to the low light, to all the depressing little details of their day-to-day existence. The water-stain on the far wall that looks like Mutant Jesus. The hot-iron mark seared into the carpeting. The fraying chevron tablecloth that Trixie’s tried (and failed) to throw out with the trash.

Opening his hand, Katya stares down at the numbers fading into the sweaty skin.

Trixie’s not gonna like it.

(At least, at first.)

But desperate times call for desperate measures, don’t they?

Gotta make that baby. Gotta save that marriage.


	2. Cross Your Heart, Hope to Die

Katya wakes up alone, sprawled on top of rumpled sheets. It’s hot. Sticky. The sweat’s tacky against his skin. His chin rests in a wet spot of drool. Groaning into the mattress, Katya sits up bleary-eyed, his bedraggled blonde hair swooped upward. Instantly, he _wants_. Coffee. A cigarette. A gentle handy. Maybe not in that order, maybe all at once. But, Katya doesn’t move—just sits there, rubbing the sand from his eyes, smacking his lips, stretching out.

Outside, the gulls are squawking and skateboards rasp and clack against the pavement. With an hour until the beginning of his shift, Katya knows he needs to get up now. Kickstart the routine: call the cab, brush the teeth, stretch out the muscles with some half-ass _ashtanga_ poses. The same routine as yesterday and the day before and the day before that...over and over and over, the true-blue Sisyphean torture of the American masses. Fuck.

Waving his arms, Katya tries to cool off, wondering why the hell it feels like he slept under Satan’s big, red, leathery ball-sack.

Then, he sees it. In the far corner, the burring desk fan bumps up against the wall, unable to finish a full rotation. Trixie must have knocked it on his way out. Over and over and over—it bumps into the wall.

_Pffttttt, thonk, Pfftttt, thonk._

Knocked back. Incomplete. Doomed until somebody deigns to right it. From the bed, Katya stares at the fan long and hard as something heavy builds in the pit of his stomach, like a black pearl.

_Pfftttt, thonk. Pfftttt, thonk._

Jesus Christ, he’s at the point where he can relate to a busted desk fan. That’s a new one. It’s definitely a new low.

Smashing one of the pillows, Katya hurls it at the fan to put it out of its misery. It clatters to the floor, all bent out of shape, and Katya decides then and there to blow off work. Fuck it. The vibrators and cock-rings will have to go on without him.

 _Spasiba balshoi, au revoir,_ fuck you.

With a pair of shades and a lopsided baseball hat, Katya ventures out into the sunny unknown—a new woman with a new lease on life—and treats himself to a huge cold brew and a lazy morning cigarette. Savors it like a fucking continental breakfast as he strolls down the boardwalk to one of those shady tourist-trap dollar emporiums. He lays down a few fivers for a burner phone. (Been awhile since he needed one of those.)

It’s barely ten in the morning but the Pleasure Pier is already bells and whistles and twinkly lights, amusement park rides whooshing around with screaming little kids in animal face-paint. Trixie talked about kids, once—got all wistful and sentimental—and Katya just laughed and laughed and laughed. Because _kids_? And _them_? And _why would we want one, where would we get one, I’m scraping out all these rancid, radioactive eggs for science, mama_. Katya brayed like a goddamn hyena, right in his face, and Trixie got quiet and looked away and never brought it up again.

Up to this day, this hour, this microscopic moment in time, Katya still feels bad about it. Because Trixie’s trying just as hard to find meaning and purpose in this new life of theirs...and Trixie’s always been fond of convention, always been a sap for that homegrown Laura Ingles Wildler prairie life. And maybe, Katya could get into that gig. Give it a fair shot. It would be nice to have little cottage up North with enough space to spin. Wouldn’t it be nice to grow into an eccentric old hag with such a limitless supply of cash that she stashes gold doubloons in her pussy?

That’s a pipedream right now. But it’s still a nice dream. And it’s nice to start dreaming again.

On a whim, Katya buys a ticket for the Wonder Wheel. He stands in line behind a gaggle of eight- year-olds noshing on cotton candy. After the kids pile on, the pizza-faced attendant gives Katya a once-over and blows hair out of his eyes.

“Really, dude?”

Katya smirks. “What? Not tall enough to ride?”

The attendant doesn’t think the innuendo is funny or charming (oh, at all) but Katya still laughs anyway, tossing himself into one of the creaky carts. Giving the kid a thumbs-up, Katya lights another cigarette. The teenager rolls his eyes and then pulls the lever.

There’s no better place to contemplate life and death than on the crest of a ferris wheel. Dangling a hundred feet over the Pacific. Listening to disastrous calliope music. It really puts things in perspective.

And Katya needs some perspective, needs to see the big picture every now and then.

Staring down at the numbers smudged across his palm, Katya takes a calming breath, reminds himself that this is scouting. Reconnaissance. Putting the feelers out there. Shouting into the void. No promises. No commitments.

It’s just a call.

At any time, he can hang up and trash the whole idea. Done deal. Case closed.

It’s actually funny how nervous he is, all jittery and excited, like he’s popping his crime cherry all over again. And that’s stupid in and of itself; because ever since he sprouted his first pube, Katya’s whole life has been a violent cornucopia of mischief and mayhem.

Still, Katya’s fingers shake as he dials the number smudged across his palm. Between his lips, the cigarette bounces nervously as the phone rings, rings, rings.

The cart halts at the top of the wheel, swinging a little. The sun glints off the ocean below and Katya stares at it, sucking in a shuddering lungful of tobacco as the ringing stops and the receiver clicks.

_“Hallelo! This is Shangela LaQueefa Wadley here at The Church of the Honeymoon Boogie, Los Santos’ number one quick-stop bridal shop. How may I direct your call?”_

Woah. Nope. Nope.

Katya hangs up. Squinting at the numbers, he dials again and replaces that suspicious “3” with an “8” instead.

This time, it only rings twice.

A familiar nasal voice drawls over the line—bored and irascible—and Katya practically shrieks with delight. Flinging his cigarette, Katya cackles. Instantly, his nerves have dissolved and he kicks up his legs, swinging the cart back and forth.

What a brilliant surprise.

“You rotted, gutted, freckle-assed, Southern-fried, toad-lickin’ leprechaun! How the fuck are you?”

“... _Oh my sweet giddy Christ, it’s you._ ”

Katya grins. “Oh, you betcha mom’s fat ass it is.”

#

When it comes to Katya, Trixie’s come to expect the unexpected, to anticipate a certain brand of bizarro fun-loving psychopathy that’s wholly unique to his elderly, Crypt Keeper boyfriend.

(Finishing each other’s sentences? Girl, please. That’s amateur hour.)

Down to the last second, Trixie knows when Katya’s about to fire a rocket, knows when to duck and cover as a missile flies over his head. Knows to listen through the gunfire for the moment that Katya runs out of bullets (because Katya never packs enough ammo) so he can toss him a spare magazine. Knows, down to exact decibel, how loud Katya needs the stereo when he’s punching the gas and lasered-in on the getaway. Trixie knows when Katya’s teetering on the edge of his self-control, knows when it’s best to let him loose and when it’s best to rein him back in.

All of that’s irrelevant, now. All of that _knowing_. But it still counts for _something_ and Trixie knows _something’s_ up when Katya insists on driving them out to some ramshackle outdoor grill along the coastal highway for ice cream cones.

Ice cream cones.

The options are limited: Either this is what passes as romance these days or Katya’s just working up the nerve to break his heart, and that’s the thought that lodges itself in Trixie’s head, pricking at the corners of his eyes. Because he knows Katya’s not happy. That Katya’s tired. That Katya wants more and needs more. Money. Sex. Sleep. He’s a Taurus, after all.

Trixie’s stomach twists. In his hand, the tower of strawberry ice cream slowly collapses on itself. Katya stares out at the stretch of ocean beyond the cliff, working his vanilla soft serve into a smooth nub. Distracted. Anxious. Katya’s leg shakes beneath the table and his fingertips bounce against the unvarnished wood. He’s so tense that his veins pop along his forearm and across the back of his hand.

Trixie wants to snap his fingers. Tell him to get on with it. To spit it out.

And it’s really fucked up that the sun’s choosing to hit Katya just right: reflecting gold-green off his eyes, gilding his brows and the sharp line of his nose, accentuating the hollows of his cheeks and the movement of his jaw as it moves all lazy and thoughtful. Katya has good bones. A good face. Especially for a maniac with a heart of gold. And Trixie briefly wonders whether he’ll be able to kiss him one more time or if he’ll even want to; honestly, in the heat of the moment, he might want to ram this stupid ice cream cone into that beak of his.

All of this sorta reminds Trixie of the night they met—facing each other, sharing junk food, both of them quiet, the atmosphere thick. He’s begun thinking about it a lot: their 2 AM escape to that shifty downtown diner back East. And Trixie knows it’s trouble that he’s begun romanticizing that night—when any sane person would call that evening the absolute worst of their life.

“You gonna eat that?”

Katya stares at the pink dessert dripping down Trixie’s knuckles.

Squaring his shoulders, Trixie steels for impact. “Are _you_ gonna tell me what’s going on?”

It comes out sounding a lot more combative than Trixie intended, but it gets the job done. Katya blinks and then sighs, his shoulders deflating. Katya’s hand inches across the table and Trixie stares at it like it’s a tarantula. Or a bee. Warm, dry fingers touch down on the top of his fist.

“Okay, alright, listen….”

“Are you leaving me?” It rushes out. And Trixie’s voice is small and hoarse, edging into righteous anger. Or sorrow. Or both.

Eyes wide, Katya snatches Trixie’s hand. “No! No, I’m- _no_. Why would you think that? Did you want to think that? Why would you think that?”

The relief is so intense that Trixie just sits back and laughs at Katya’s stricken expression. “Because you took me out for ice cream, you idiot,” Trixie chuckles, finally able to breathe, “What was I supposed to think?”

Katya waves his arms. “Jesus Christ, I was trying to be—was trying to be—I dunno-”

“If you’re about to say romantic...If we are at a point where _you_ are trying to be romantic….”

Biting into his cone, Katya props his elbows on the table and munches away with a mouth half-open. “I can be romantic,” he insists around a mouth-full, all indignant, “This imagination is fertile, mama. I could woo you. I could you woo the shit out of you. I like scented candles.”

“If you can get a Jankee that smells like my stepdad’s jockstrap, I’ll be here for it.”

When they laugh together, and Trixie catches Katya’s eyes, it feels like it used to: stupid and simmering and fun. And when was the last time they had any kind of fun together?

So, maybe this ice cream date isn’t fully pathetic. And okay, maybe Katya’s romantic in his own way. It’s always _in his own way_ : a little crooked, a little unconventional, a little misguided. But at least it’s real. Honest. Unfiltered. Brash and overt and physical.

Rolling the strawberry cone against the flat of his tongue, Trixie watches a bead of sweat dangling against the vein of Katya’s temple. When Katya’s fingertips brush against the divots between his knuckles, Trixie suddenly feels so fucking _touch-starved_ that it takes everything not to ditch the ice cream, slide beneath the table, and get lucky in front of straight people on a Tuesday. It’s perched on the tip of his tongue: Take me home, already, you idiot. A big sultry whine for an afternoon delight.

But eventually, Katya’s wistful smile fades away and Trixie sees the nerves creeping back in like a drunk prom queen.

God dammit.

“There is _something_ , though,” Trixie prompts, pitching his voice low, “Isn’t there?”

Holding up his palms, Katya nods. “Yes and okay. Hear me out on this. Before you say anything….”

Katya angles his head, staring at him (unblinking) until Trixie realizes he wants some kind of verbal confirmation.

“Okay, yeah, sure.”

“No interruptions?”

Trixie’s mouth twists into an impatient knot. “No promises.”

Gotta keep those expectations grounded in reality, Linda. If Katya’s about to tell him that he’s been fired or they’re being evicted or he wants to have a threesome with his greasy boss Jeremy, Trixie’s gonna interrupt. It’s just inevitable.

Maybe Detox and Raven are getting bored, feeling petty, sending out the Squirrelfriend squadrons again.

(Maybe he wants to like...actually get married or something. Thinking it’s a break-up one minute and a proposal the next...Trixie hasn’t had this kind of emotional whiplash since the last Christmas he spent in the Mid-West, eating his mother’s dirt-cake and dodging his stepdad’s beer bottles.)

But as it turns out, it’s not any of those things.

It’s fully one-hundred-percent worse.

Eyes manic, hands flying around, Katya just dives right in about making “preliminary calls,” about the new gang on Grove Street feuding with the Squirrelfriends, about opportunity, about snaps. All Trixie can think about is his next shift at The Vanilla Unicorn and how he’s gonna paint Sapphire to look like a Bratz doll that’s been through the blender.

“And who picks up? _Ginger_! You remember Ginger, right?”

Katya’s stopped talking.

And he’s staring again, waiting for an answer.

“Yeah,” Trixie answers, “Of course I remember Ginger.”

Good ol’ Ginger used to be their go-between, fielding them jobs and taking a hefty cut at the end of the day. When they went underground, they cut all ties. Better for everybody that way.

But Katya and Ginger went way back, before Katya’s days of slinging dope and running guns for the Russian mob, before his cushy life pimping Chachki’s Hotlanta pornstars, before the street racing in Liberty City and the night they met. And still, Katya didn’t know Ginger’s real name.

(“You forgot it, didn’t you,” Trixie once accused him, cackling into Katya’s shoulder.

“We were _cellmates_ ,” Katya tried to explain, “Listen, in Tuckahoe, you’re a number or a nickname. Ginger will always be Ginger.”

“And you forgot it.”

“I completely forgot it.”)

“...and Ginger will vouch for us. We can chop it up with The Snakes, see what they’re offering,” Katya says, gripping Trixie’s sweaty hand, “This could be it! Our shot. One more score. An encore. We can get even. And a real pay-out. Like we used to, bitch!”

“No,” Trixie says, blunt as can be.

“No….”

“Yeah. _No_. _Absolutely no_...No,” Trixie sputters, struggling to keep his voice low, “Do you...Do you have an actual deathwish? We were hunted into obscurity. We’re fully out of practice in every respect. What makes you think we’re even slightly prepared to get in the middle of a gang war? And come out alive? Like...I’m sorry, but I like living.”

“Oh, yeah…’cause we’re really living, Barbara.”

“Shut up. Not everybody has your fucked-up luck. In the last six months, I haven’t shot anything but bottom-shelf tequila. I’m rustier than a Roman dildo.”

Deflated, Katya looks away, crunching into the cone to punctuate his frustration. As Katya looks over the highway, Trixie can see the cogs turning: the slight tremor in his jaw, the way he chews the inside of his lip. Katya’s not gonna let this one go. If he can help it, Katya doesn’t let _anything_ go. Most of the time, Trixie loves that about him, loves making Katya really work for what he wants. But it’s like playing tug-of-war with a puppy, it’s all fun and games until the dog really bites down and starts swinging your arm out of the socket. Trixie’s prepared for it.

“I could do it alone,” Katya says finally, still looking outward, still pensive.

Trixie doesn’t know whether to be offended or concerned. “ _Alone_?”

“I worked solo longer than I had a partner.”

This time, Trixie’s the one that reaches out, squeezing Katya’s hand until he finally looks into his eyes. “Hey, I like living...but I like you living, too. Okay?”

Katya sighs. “I know it’s scary but anything worth doing is gonna be scary, Tracey.”

“Yeah. I know,” Trixie deadpans, “I’ve been doing you for almost three years.”

When Katya laughs, evaporating the tension, Trixie feels a little bit better about dashing his dreams of a comeback. A little bit.

“We’ll find another way,” Trixie mutters, trying to believe it himself, “You and me? We’ll figure it out.”

“You can’t tell me you don’t miss it though.”

“I don’t.”

“I know you’re lying to me,” Katya says, taking another big chomp of his cone, “But remember this: Lying to ourselves is more deeply ingrained than lying to others. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, thank you very much, I did go to community college.”

Cracking a smile, Trixie doesn’t respond and Katya doesn’t push. They lapse into silence, eating their ice cream as the swollen sun hangs over the horizon like an overripe peach. No matter how hard he tries, Trixie can’t forget how good it used to be. Can’t erase the dog days from his mind. Can’t forget the sting of greenback papercuts and the way Katya would suck at the wound, pinch the skin with his white, white teeth.

They used to be a big fucking deal. Unstoppable. Inseparable. A force of nature. Us against the world.

Trixie can’t forget how much he loved being a part of that. But he also can’t forget how it felt being _marked_. Being shot on sight. Being jumped, poisoned, shanked. Paranoid at every dark corner, sick to his stomach whenever Katya snuck out to the 24-hour Binco for a pack of cigarettes. For a little while, Katya became an actual insomniac, his hand trembling on a gat beneath the pillow, staring at the door of their apartment, at its chintzy little lock, while Trixie pretended to sleep.

Living in fear wasn’t fucking _cute_.

Trixie doesn’t want to think about it anymore. Doesn’t want to acknowledge his trigger finger itching for action. Doesn’t want to talk about it anymore.

“Hey.”

Katya looks up.

Trixie swallows hard. “Would you do something for me?”

“I’d do anything for you.”

Katya says it so easy and Trixie _knows_ it’s true.

He wants to say, “Promise you won’t bring it up again. Promise you won’t do it. Promise you won’t die on me, you beautiful idiot.”

Trixie doesn’t.

“Chew with your mouth closed, you animal,” he says instead, his heart clenching at the newfound glow in Katya’s eyes, smiling tight as the last of his ice cream melts in his mouth. 

 


	3. Disco Devil

Katya doesn’t mention The Big Idea again. Though it’s been days since Trixie shot him down over ice cream, Katya seems to have completely excised the idea of a comeback from his brain. With every lull of conversation, Trixie waits for Katya to take advantage of the silence, to say something, to press. But he says nothing. He lets those quiet moments slip away—those golden opportunities to chip away at Trixie’s big, resounding “No.” Instead, Katya folds a playing card and picks at the chop suey caught in his incisor. Or doodles obscene characters on the tablecloth with a blunt Sharpie. Or stretches his toes to push in a cracked VHS of some shmaltzy science fiction feature that he knows by heart.

He acts completely _indifferent_. Over it. Like he’s okay with accepting defeat and moving on. And it’s driving Trixie crazy.

Go figure.

A comeback, a pay-off, a grand finale...the thought begins playing in Trixie’s head over and over and over, like “Gimme More” for the thousandth millionth time, and the idea is so goddamn appealing it’s insane. It’s like the Paul Rudd of bad ideas.

In the backroom of Suburban, while he stabs at the frozen islands of his shitty microwave lunch, Trixie fantasizes about being Battlefield Barbie again, raising hell in all her bombastic glory. At The Vanilla Unicorn, he fucks up Sapphire’s eyeliner twice in a row (“Oops! Sorry, girl.”) and then stews in the corner of the strip club. He tosses back jagerbombs, watching the neon fan flutter across body glitter and the dark, tobacco-stained walls; and while Sapphire twirls around the pole, Trixie thinks of buckshot and dynamite and concussive sparks, turbo tuning and black smoke.

The thing is: Trixie never wanted a life of anonymity. Or to have the best years of his life behind him. Bitch, he’s not even thirty yet.

The only “9 to 5” he’s ever wanted is on high-fidelity vinyl. He’s never wanted to be a nobody—like his stepdad told him he would be—or a bloated alcoholic living for late-night reruns of _The $100,000 Pyramid_ —like his stepfather was.

For a backwoods black-eyed runaway, becoming an outlaw is the closest thing to becoming a legend. An icon. A star. For Trixie, it’s never been about the money or the action. He loves doing _something_ , being _somebody_. With Katya, he was part of something twisted and special and unstoppable. They were The Dynamic Duo.

They were good together.

They were the best.

The next time Trixie’s with Katya—not riding shotgun on the way home from work, not passing through the doorway like ships in the night—they’re spending a lazy Sunday afternoon at home. Having any downtime is rare for them; but by some miracle, Trixie’s not working at Suburban or TVU and well, Katya’s down to one job now. (Today, the yoga studio’s officially closed for Modhu Purnima but _unofficially_ closed for roach extermination.)

Sitting on the bed, Trixie works on his old rosewood Gibson from stock to bridge. He’s polishing the frets, conditioning the wood, and cleaning the fingerboard. It’s half-hearted work. A smokescreen, really, as he watches Katya read some fantasy paperback at the kitchen table.

With his bare foot propped up and a cigarette hanging from his lips, Katya tips back on the chair, holding the book in one hand and playing with a butterfly knife in the other. The knife flutters through his fingers, tossing sunlight across the walls. His foot bobs to the beat of the reggae bumping in the dispensary below.

(“Disco Devil” by Lee “Scratch” Perry. The owner of Smoke on the Water is a wannabe rastafarian who plays this song a lot; but otherwise, Thorgy’s not half bad.)

Trixie watches and waits as Katya’s cigarette grows long, grey, and droopy. When the ashes finally drop to his lap, Katya doesn’t even flinch. The pretty blade twirls around his fingers like a ribbon, clicking and snapping. He turns the page of the book with the flick of a thumb.

Trixie sighs. It’s time to bite the bullet.

“Okay,” he blurts out, putting the guitar aside, “You win. I’ll do it.”

Confused, Katya glances over, shutting the book.

“I’ll do it,” Trixie repeats, this time with more force.

“What? The...the sugar thing?”

“No, dummy. The job! I’ll do _The Job_.”

The knife snaps closed and the chair clunks down on all four feet. For a minute, Katya just looks dumbstruck. “Wait. You...you _want_ to?”

“Yeah.”

A smile grows across Katya’s face. “Yeah?”

Trixie laughs. “ _Yeah_.”

Katya grits his teeth, all triumphant. “I knew it! I knew it. Oh, I love you, you fucking...oh, I fucking _knew_ ….”

Katya pounces onto the bed with such glee that Trixie feels infused with it. Energized. Excited. And he laughs.

Katya’s knees dip the bed as he shuffles over and descends on him. Katya’s hands cup Trixie’s face and he kisses him over and over—hard, sweet, and biting. Trixie can taste the sharp tang of tobacco and he breathes it in. For once, he doesn’t care.

It’s been so long.

He remembers one night, not too long ago, when Katya reached out for him in the dark and Trixie nudged him away.

“It ain’t wine, Barbara. There’s no value in corking it up,” Katya whispered against his shoulder.

“Well, no one’s stopping you from popping a bottle,” he replied, regretting each prickly word when Katya’s hand lifted from his shoulder. When he sighed, sounding blindsided, sounding hurt, and just said, “...Okay.”

Katya got up and padded toward the bathroom and Trixie winced at the blinding white light, flinched at the way Katya shut the door behind him. For as long as Trixie waited that night, Katya didn’t come back out.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want it. (Or him.) But Trixie’s always known the difference between Katya really wanting him and Katya wanting to scratch an itch. Between Katya being bored and Katya being sprung. He can tell when Katya’s thinking about _him_ and when Katya’s just trying to avoid thinking about something else. And when it’s the two of them, Trixie wants to be everything. He’s an all-or-nothing type of girl. Always has been, always will be.

These kisses right now are everything. These small, stupid, grateful kisses feel like coming home.

His fingers trail up Katya’s arm, over warm sun-baked skin and along a firm line of muscle, curling into the hem of his sleeve. Katya’s jaw bristles against his own and his lips pull at him slower now. It’s so nice that Trixie’s head swims a little, his heartbeat surging through his limbs. His fists wrench the hem of Katya’s shirt, unsure whether he wants to pull it off or pull him closer, and he can’t really help the undignified, unflattering, fully unsexy grunt of Katya’s name.

Katya grins. “Oh. Ditto.”

“Shut up,” Trixie murmurs, smiling as he chases Katya’s lips, hoping to lure that curious tongue. He’s ready to get this show on the road. Pull him down, roll around, and get fucked.

Then, suddenly, Katya pulls back. He grips Trixie’s shoulders, eyes wide.

“Wait. In full geish?”

“I mean...we got to,” Trixie says, smiling because _of course_ , it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “We’re back.”

They’re back.

“We’re back,” Katya repeats, almost reverently, before he kisses him again. His breath hits Trixie’s face in warm, drugging puffs, repeating those words like a mantra.

We’re back, we’re back, we’re back.

It’s good to be back.

“You’re not just doing this for me. Right?”

Impatient, Trixie scoffs, clapping a hand around the back of his neck, pulling him forward. “No, I want it.”

Finally, with a big wolfish grin, Katya crawls on top of him. They paw at each other underneath the open window, where the sea breeze cools virgin sweat. Trixie breathes deep and short, burrowing a hand beneath Katya’s waistband, palming the heft of him, smooth and hot and thickening.

“You want it, huh?”

“I want it,” Trixie murmurs and Katya groans shamelessly into his shoulder, slicks up in Trixie’s grip like they’re both fucking sixteen years old. It feels just like that. Hips canting into the mattress, hungry for friction, as Katya squeezes his ass and breathes harsh into his ear, “It’s gonna be so good.”

They pull at each others’ clothes. Fabric catches on ears and toes. Flung to the side, Trixie’s pants topple the bedside lamp.

Slumped against the headboard, Trixie gives in to instinct and tugs at his own cock, practically preening at the way Katya’s eyes go a little feral, racing all over his body like it’s the first time he’s even seen him. Katya’s teeth dig into his lower lip. His nostrils flare. He’s still the same lean-mean-killing-machine he’s always been—pale and vascular, slender and strong—and god, so fucking ready with his dick flush against his lower stomach. It’s stupid hot. And Trixie grabs at his thigh, the slap of skin making his nerves sharp and needy and aching, and he just wants to suck him off. Make him happy. Hear it and feel it and swallow it.

But that’s not what either of them really want. And thank God, Trixie anticipated something like this. (Hoped for it, at least.) Even though Katya’s always been down to get real filthy, like the lovely lowlife he is, Trixie’s always been the one with standards, thank you very much.

The second that Trixie twists away to claw at the bedside table, Katya’s on him, caged against his back and gripping his hip hard enough to bruise, taking a greedy handful of his backside. Trixie bucks into the mattress, unable to focus as his fingers scrabble against the drawer. He yanks it open as Katya ruts against him, chuckling a bit breathless as he drags the dewy head of his cock along the cleft of Trixie’s ass.

Trixie’s learned that if you give Katya an inch, he’ll take a mile. He’ll draw this out until Trixie’s begging. All night, if you indulge him. It’s like an event. Awful and amazing. Like the deep pleasure that comes with putting pressure on a delicate wound that’s hurting in a delicate place.

(“I’m a woman. I’m a woman. I love the slow burn. The pussy doctor says it’s chlamydia but I told him that suffering’s good for the soul,” Katya once explained to him.

Trixie blinked. “Do you want to kill my boner?”

“Oh, I’d have to say a lot worse to kill that bad boy.”

And he was 100% right.)

Trixie’s way too keyed up for all that shit right now. Already, that sweet pressure is building at the base of his spine. He chucks the bottle of lube over his shoulder.

It hits Katya square in the face.

“Ow!” Katya rears back, wiggling his nose. “ _Whthfuck_!”

Flashing a look over his shoulder, Trixie rolls his eyes. “Oh my God, just—”

But Katya’s still pinching the bridge of his nose, grimacing. For a moment, Trixie’s impatience disappears. “Wait, are you ok?”

Katya laughs a little, sniffling. “Right in the _nose_ , you bitch. Jesus.”

Smiling, Trixie reaches back and kisses him softly, pulling Katya close again. “Just get on with it before I come to my senses.” He can’t keep the tremor from his voice. His wanting is a sharp edge again and his dick’s practically strapped to his abdomen. Katya’s smile grows against his cheek.

Palming his chest, Katya’s hand sweeps downward, playing with his balls a little before he suddenly pumps Trixie’s cock like it’s a goddamn 20 gauge and it’s just... _lightning_. Sheer. Bright. Whining, Trixie lurches forward, eyes fluttering.

(It feels so good for being so simple. So nothing. Just a helping hand. But then again, it’s not nothing. Because it’s Katya’s hand. And that makes all the difference in the world.)

Eyes slipping closed, Trixie bucks into Katya’s touch, planting a hand on the mattress.

“I’m sorry,” Katya apologizes, his voice hushed and hoarse beneath Trixie’s ear. He ruts against him. “This is gonna be so quick.”

The blonde’s cock is insistent against his lower back and God, Trixie wants it inside him so bad that it’s borderline pathetic.

“It’s okay,” Trixie breathes, “Me too.”

“Okay, good. Good.”

Trixie hears a plastic snap and then the slurp of cheap lube. The kiss of cold against his asshole makes him hiss and clench before Katya’s fingers start rubbing that ring of muscle, working them in and making it real good. His hand grips Trixie’s waist.

Biting the inside of his cheek, Trixie whimpers when Katya finally surges into him. Moaning loud and low against back as he begins fucking him hard. Like they both want. Trixie grips the headboard, keening at the slap of skin, working against him and wanting more than anything to feel Katya lose it. Katya presses his fingers against Trixie’s bobbing throat, pulls him back. His head is light, his groans strangled. They are starving. Erratic thrusts, toothy kisses, furious hands...it is quick. And someone, and Trixie doesn’t even know who, whispers “I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you” over and over until it’s over. Until they’re both boneless and breathing hard, collapsed and still, lying in a dirty, sticky brew that’s wonderful and disgusting and _theirs_.

They don’t say anything. They just smile at each other, eyes already heavy and warm. Katya smokes a cigarette, like he’s Anne fucking Bancroft, and then screws the butt into a cluster of chipped paint on the window sill above the bed. He sinks into the mattress and closes his eyes. As Katya’s breath evens out, Trixie watches his last exhale twirling across the ceiling. It’s thin and blue, dancing in the deep sherbert dream of a Sunday afternoon.

He feels good. He feels right where he needs to be. And more than ever, Trixie feels the other side of the coin: The two imaginary girls lurking beneath their bed, stirring back to life. They’re stuffed in trunks, their guts and garters locked up in pieces, hidden under the mattress like two dead hookers. Fridged but not forgotten. And now, those ballistic blonde boogeywomen are back.

Officially.

“We’re back….”

When his hand falls off the mattress, dangling there, Trixie imagines his devil debutante reaching out for it. With her cheap costume jewelry that clinks when she loads a rifle, with her glossy bubblegum nails that she’s filed into deadly points—and his fingers twitch in the empty air.


	4. The Night We Met

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is it a clumsy faux-pas to include a few flashback chapters at this point in the story? Eh, maybe. Probably. (Also, I straight-up lifted Cyrus’ famous monologue from the 1979 cult film, “The Warriors.” I know that and I’m at peace with it.)

**Back East, Liberty City**  
**4 Years Ago**

Trixie never could have anticipated that the course of his entire life would be set into motion in the backroom of a rundown chopshop in Hackenslash, New Jersey.

But that’s how life works, doesn’t it?

If he hadn’t ventured into that online forum for Korean pop music and responded to Kim’s post, or bothered to discover that they also shared an uncanny interest in bodyshop work and theatrical make-up...Kim never would vouched for him at Teets n’ Assky’s, or given him a place to stay. And Trixie might have never worked up the nerve to stand up to Dear Old Dad and hightail it out of Wisconsin—laughing with a mouth of blood, a purple shiner, and a loaded .44 Colt in his stepdad’s rickety pickup.

But he did. And now, he’s prowling back and forth across Hickey Bridge, boosting cars J.I.T. in the legendary streets of Liberty City before dissecting them in a dingy garage at the corner of Cassiar and Big Horn. Every day, he balances the legitimate with the illegitimate, the risk with the reward. Every day is new. And truth be told, Trixie’s acquired a taste for operating outside the law, making fat stacks for joyrides, building something out of what’s used and broken, answering to nobody…

Except Teets Coulee.

And on a Tuesday afternoon in mid-April, Trixie wrings his grease-graffitied hands in front of his employer of only six months and risks his job to ask the world of him.

“Damn, you’ve got some nerve,” Coulee breathes, almost in disbelief. He sits back, kicking his heels on a desk littered in phony pink slips and tattered invoices.

“It’s a good thing I like ambition,” Coulee says, running his tongue over his crowded white teeth, “Most cats would throw you out on your ass, y’know? Askin’ something like that.”

“Kim told me you and Assky bought into the drag race every year,” Trixie explains, sparing a look at the girl gutting a stolo Declasse in the garage. It’s a struggle for Kim to maintain balance on the creeper.

Pursing his lips, Coulee rises from his chair and shuts the office door, muffling the persistent clunk and clang of the garage. “What do you know about Assky?”

Teets has an effortless kind of cool: an easy, worldly confidence that makes him seem like an authority and an aficionado of everything and anything. But he’s tense now. His eyes sear into Trixie like two spotlights. He’s as serious as Trixie’s ever seen him and Trixie has the good sense to be nervous.

“Apparently, not a whole lot.”

“Don’t pussyfoot around, Mattel,” Coulee says, snapping his fingers, “C’mon.”

“Kim told me Assky won a circuit, took the prize money, and then split. That’s all I know.”

According to Kim, Assky used to have connections with the Russian mob. Her family helped finance the garage and her contacts brought a lot of business before the bosses got busted and the whole operation went belly-up. The Hauses, as they were now, started grabbing turf and filling the power vacuum left behind by the Rascalov Mafiya.

Somewhere along the line, the annual drag race circuit started as a sundown ceasefire for the rival gangs, the only night of the year that the bosses could parlay on neutral ground. But it became the underbelly’s own kind of Mardi Gras, the only night of the year for unaligned prospects to get some real exposure to the wider criminal network of Liberty City. You wanna make a name for yourself? Or see the real money? Placing in the drag race is the best place to start.

“Split, huh? That’s what Kim told you?”

“Listen, you don’t know me too well but you know I work hard and I play fair and if you cut me a deal on parts and let me use Kim for labor, I’ll give you fifty percent of whatever I win. Or you can...have my kneecaps or whatever. I’ll put it in writing if that’s what you want.”

“Kid, I love that hustle but you’re not gonna win,” Coulee chuckles, sinking into his patchwork armchair.

“Wow. A vote of confidence.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Mattel, you’re an all-star around here. You’re good. But sometimes, good ain’t enough, you know what I’m sayin’? A good driver doesn’t always make a good racer. Not for that beast.”

Well, there goes that dream, Trixie thinks. Without Coulee’s resources, he’s stuck in the small time, spinning his wheels in Hackenslash for at least for another year. It doesn’t feel right. This is the time. This is the race. He can feel it.

He practically deflates.

Coulee cradles his chin and thens sighs. “God. Alright, alright. Fine. It’s off-hours and I’ll dock the parts and labor from your pay. But listen, you wanna eat? Then you better bring me an extra delivery for every day you waste time on that thing. I still gotta live a champagne lifestyle on a lemonade budget and I won’t change that for any goddamn street race. We got a deal?”

#

After oodles of bribery, flattery, and flat-out begging, Kim finally agrees to sink all her free time into modding Trixie’s hot pink monstrosity. The car has to kick-ass and look good doing it—and there’s no one better suited for the task than Kimberly Chi. Using a Vapid Dominator as the external frame, they spend weeks suiting the car with a racing chassis, EMS upgrades to the V8, sport suspension, LozspeedTen wheels, and a metallic Pfister Pink finish.

At the end of it all, she’s beautiful, she’s perfect, and she looks like she’s worth it: Worth bleeding all his money. Worth the all-nighters and the weeks he’s spent busting his ass to fulfill Coulee’s quota.

The night of the race, Kim insists on going with him. Although Trixie makes a show of not needing or wanting Kim’s company, he’s secretly glad to have her along and she knows it.

“Let’s remember: I’ve actually been to one of these races before,” Kim teases, buckling up in the passenger side, “If I didn’t come with you, I’d have to identify your freeloading ass at the Algonquin Morgue tomorrow and find a way to bedazzle your toe-tag. I don’t need that on National Donut Day.”

En route, Trixie sings along to some of Kim’s stupid dream-pop, smiles at her when she looks over at him. Under the blue lights of the dashboard, he sees purple knuckles and blood-blistered nails drumming against the steering wheel. It’s all evidence of an occupational hazard that he’s proud of tonight, maneuvering this pink monster under the midnight lights of the city that never sleeps.

When they cross the bridge into Bohan, Kim twists the volume to zero. The leather upholstery creaks as she sits upright. On high alert, Trixie scans the streets as they venture further into the borough, toward territory that Kim refers to as The Crowne. The neighborhood’s unusually quiet and empty, even darker than the forgotten cuts of Hackenslash.

Trixie watches for every-and-anything. According to Kim, The Crowne is such an oft-disputed territory that it’s devolved into a kind of No Man’s Land. Rotted infrastructure, a bayside industrial park, and minimal oversight by law enforcement. It’s an ideal spot for a detente between the bosses, and for the race itself; but it’s also a hotbed for pandemonium in general.

Trixie’s the only car on the road when he stops at a red light.

A darkened cop car sits beneath the flickering fluorescent lights of a streetside gas station. From inside the cab, a beefy officer stares at them, slurping on a 64 oz. Sludgie while his Doberman flashes its sharp white teeth in the passenger seat.

“The cops won’t lift a finger if everybody keeps the peace,” Kim assures him, “Everybody’s got somebody in their pocket.” But she still sounds nervous. And they both should be: A dirty cop’s cooperation and complacency is about as reliable as a priest in a preschool.

The second the light turns green, Trixie knocks the gear shift into 2nd and stomps the gas.

As they near the start point, Trixie slows the car to a crawl. The Interior Illusions Lounge is a full-service dollar-theatre sitting on the corner of Crowne and Tudor. Mobs of street soldiers and spectators shuffle toward the blinking pink sign. The lot’s littered with burn barrels and autos with their highs-on and hoods popped.

From down the street, Trixie can feel the deep thrumming bass of competing boomboxes. He pulls into a line of cars being flagged down by a girl in a Pißwasser bodysuit and a distressed pair of Daisy Dukes. Kim pops the glovebox, retrieving the envelope with the buy-in: a cool five hundred that twists in Trixie’s gut as Kim rolls down the window and forks it over.

Smacking on a piece of gum, the girl counts it out. “Party,” she declares, folding it all up again. She rests her forearms on the weatherstrip, poking her head inside Kim’s open window. “This looks fucking cool, man,” she laughs, looking over the interior, “You poppin’ her cherry tonight?”

“Like a quarterback with cystic acne,” Trixie quips before grimacing at his own visual.

Her eyes are a little vacant when she smiles and nods. “Cool. Hah. So, like, welcome to the seventh circuit, motherfuckas. Um, so...one circuit, two laps. It’ll start here at Crowne. Then down Union, Nayle, and Tudor. First prize gets ten grand and whatever...like a fucking pizza party or something.”

With a charming smile, she pulls away and gives the hard-top an affectionate slap. “So, good luck!”

The lot is teeming with people. It’s a miracle that Trixie finds a decent spot at all. His car draws onlookers. (As she _should_. As she _deserves_.)

Opening up a toolkit, Kim pops the hood for a final tune-up while Trixie scopes out the party.

Networking. That’s what it’s all about. Schmoozing. The drag race is just an underbelly Christmas Party: all about the spectacle and the drama, lights and posturing, booze and stacks and secret rendezvous. Just instead of Bing Crosby, it’s Black Hippy. It’s all about making connections.

Trixie hates to admit it but he’s a little overwhelmed by the amount of people milling around and carrying on. In theory, he’s charming and acerbic and upfront in social situations. Parties don’t scare him and people tend to notice him. But now, it’s like he’s totally confronted by his lack of knowledge about how Liberty City operates—who’s who and what’s what. Kim hasn’t given him nearly enough information to make this comfortable.

A chorus of pure horsepower rumbles up the street as a motorcycle club in full regalia pulls into the lot. They’re followed by two cars primed for the circuit.

“Haus of Haunt Motorcycle Club?”

Kim laughs into the engine. “Woah. What gave that away?”

Trixie chuckles. “Shut up.”

Though the rest of the HHMC filters inside the strip club, their leader stays behind. Lighting a cigarette, he kicks his studded leather boots against the curb. He’s thin, with a dimpled chin and a shock of white hair. His fringed vest hangs off his frame like shreds of elk velvet. In bold red thread, it says ‘Needles.’ When something catches Needles’ eye, he whips the cigarette aside and Trixie follows his eyeline across the lot.

A slender figure with long dark hair lounges against the hood of an impressive black Verlierer. They’ve got their chin tipped back and their eyes closed, looking all imperial, ornamental like a rapier is ornamental. The streetlight overhead glows on them like this whole race is just an elaborate excuse for a fashion shoot. Trixie knows this has to be the infamous Frankie “Chachki” Malone, porn czarina of Hotlanta Pictures. According to Kim, Chachki’s syndicate has its hands in everything now: gun-running, prostitution, point-shaving, bookmaking, the works. And now, after poaching a few contacts from Needles and the HHMC, Chachki’s invading The Crowne and peddling the same narcotics that once solidified Needles’ hold on the place.

Ask anyone and this rivalry’s officially dead—with Needles on the outs. From what Trixie understands, there’s enough bad blood between those two to tie up a clinic.

Behind him, Kim stumbles to her feet. She sees what he sees.

“Fingers crossed this race even happens,” she mumbles, wiping her hands on a grease rag as Needles stalks inside the club.

“Fill me in, Kim,” Trixie demands, gesturing toward Chachki and the crew corralling the sleek sportscar. There’s a lot of women—women in short skirts and sky-high stilettos that Trixie can only assume are here to ‘work’ the crowd.

“Alright, so, uh...that’s Pearl,” Kim says, gesturing to a gorgeous blonde slumped against the fender. Pearl blinks slowly, her eyes low and sultry. Her septum glimmers as she turns her head and blows out a plume of smoke. “All she does is look pretty and handle Hotlanta’s social media, but she turns girls out like…” Kim tries to snap her fingers but they don’t zip with all the grease.

“So, she’s a glorified receptionist.”

“Well, yeah. But no one talks to Chachki without going through Pearl.”

“Great. What about him?”

There’s only one other character who lingers beside Chachki: a slim, pale man dressed in black. He’s got sharp cheekbones and a tense jaw and Trixie can’t tell if he’s handsome or if it’s the streetlights giving him those angles. Either way, he’s still got pretty nice arms and there’s something subtle about the way he carries himself, the way he moves, that tips Trixie off. It’s probably just a case of Stress Thirst but Trixie can’t look away from him.

Kim looks over her shoulder. “Who? Oh, Chachki’s underboss. Zamolodchikov.”

“Zama-”

“Don’t even try it, you hick,” Kim says, turning back to the engine, “Everybody just calls him Zamo.”

“Russian?”

Kim nods. “Somehow, Zamo got lucky and made it out of the sting that took down the Rascalovs. And then he hopped into bed with Chachki.”

Trixie frowns. “What, like... _literally_?”

“How should I know? Why does that matter?”

“Knowledge is power, Kimberly. Get into it.”

“Pizza is power,” Kim corrects him, “Why do you think the Sicilians ran things for so long? Do you know what I’d do for a cannoli right now?”

With a wry smirk, Zamolodchikov leans down and says something to Chachki that makes the boss break character and laugh, loud and low. When Zamo smiles, it’s the kind of smile you see on TV, the kind of smile that’ll sell your soul for $19.95 and Trixie feels like he’s got his hand halfway down his pocket already.

Trixie clears his throat. “He seems...friendly.”

Kim snorts. “That’s a word for it.”

Suddenly, a girl cuts across the parking lot as fast as her heels can carry her. She walks like she’s on a mission. Trixie watches her wipe her bleeding mascara, can tell by her scuffed-up knees and the way her lipstick halos her lips that she’s a working girl. With two hands, she grabs Zamo’s arm and tugs him away from the car. Unfazed, Chachki returns to moonbathing.

It’s a small, common scene that nobody pays attention to: The girl’s john comes traipsing after her, his belt loose and clinking, his face red. They both start shouting, gesturing at each other while Zamo plants himself between them and listens. He lights a cigarette, takes one puff, and hands it to the hooker as she and and the trick begin hurling accusations at each other. Trixie has to strain to hear any of it over the music and the engines and the crowd but it’s something about a rubber, about money, about cum.

“He’s a pimp,” Trixie realizes, unable to conceal his distaste.

“Or a madam, depending on the day,” Kim snipes from under the hood, “But wow. Two for two. You’re on a roll. You’ll be don of the city in no time.”

Trixie ignores her.

After ashing the cigarette, the hooker nibbles at her nails. The john appeals to Zamo, flinging his arm in the girl’s direction. She flicks him off, biting back with something that makes him even angrier; and then, without another word, Zamo taps her thigh with the back of his hand. Immediately, she widens her legs and Zamo snakes a hand under her skirt. It’s clinical, like he’s feeling for something.

And he finds it.

Trixie grimaces as Zamo inspects his wet fingers, scissoring them a bit, sniffing at them. Then, he turns back to the john without that easy million-dollar smile, and gestures for payment with the same dirty hand. The john kicks up a fuss, shoving Zamo’s shoulder; and Trixie doesn’t see the responding switchblade until it’s already spun through Zamo’s fingers and is pointed at the guy’s throat. This time, the john digs in his pocket for the money and beats a fast retreat.

This is when Trixie suspects the girl will get a sharp reprimand and Zamo will take his cut, send her on her way. Sure enough, he counts the cash first; but then glances over his shoulder at Chachki (who isn’t at all interested) and hands the whole wad of dough to the girl. She hesitates but he insists. Stuffing the cash in the waistband of her skirt, she gives him a firm kiss on the cheek and then sidles off, a little brighter and a little less worse for wear.

It’s cute, but Trixie’s a little too cynical to take it at face-value. A pimp’s still a pimp, no matter how gorgeous his smile is. Throwing the girls a bone every now and then has got to keep those hoes loyal. They won’t bite the hand that feeds them and Zamo doesn’t have to hurt them or go muff-diving...a win/win in Trixie’s estimation.

Staring at him as he takes a long drag of his smoke, Trixie feels an impatient, nervous urge to go over there and introduce himself.

Could he work for a pimp? What would he do? Chauffeur his girls around town, trick-to-trick? Not exactly glamorous. And bitch, he’s way over-qualified for that errand boy crap. That won’t get him where he wants to go. Zamo’s not nearly cute enough to go that route. Not _nearly_.

God, how long has it been since he’s had sex? It’s been months. Could even be a year. And it’s right then, when Trixie begins counting past April-June-and November, that Zamolodchikov catches him staring. They actually lock eyes and Trixie almost chokes on his own spit. Smoke streams from Zamo’s nose as he grins, smiling at Trixie like they’re two kids across a playground, like Trixie just caught him doing something naughty. It’s not a menacing grin, not even a little bit, and Trixie doesn’t know what to do with that. 

Zamolodchikov brings two fingers to his lips before turning them sideways, opening them into a ‘V,’ and waggling his tongue between them. Quickly, Trixie turns away and he thinks...maybe...he hears Zamo laughing.

Kim drops her wrench into the toolbox. She reaches up to rub her eyes before thinking better of it and her hands fall limp on her lap. Trixie knows she’d much rather be at home, plugged into her PS4 with a rosewater facemask and a cozy pair of knee-highs. He should be kissing her two left feet with all the work she’s put into this passion project. She’s exhausted.

“Kim,” he says softly, “you’ve got friends here, right?”

“Naomi’s somewhere,” she says, with a hint of a smile, “But you’ve already met her. She doesn’t really know anybody big a—“

He taps her shoulder. “No, no...go hang out with her,” he insists, “You’ve done enough, Kim. More than enough. Really. I’ll be fine on my own.”

Kim almost loses her balance as she gets to her feet. (But that’s not exhaustion, that’s just Kim.)

“I can make friends on my own,” Trixie insists.

“If you say so.” Kim isn’t convinced and Trixie _tries_ not to take any offense. Still, she takes Trixie’s advice and wanders off to find Naomi.

Leaning against the car, Trixie’s still unsure where to begin and who to begin with. He lingers there, trying not to look like a clown. His eyes slide to the peripheral but Zamo’s already gone and he doesn’t want to examine the weird, misplaced disappointment he feels about it.

When he turns, Trixie startles at a blonde girl messing around the inside of his hood. Her belly chain shimmies down her midriff as she leans in and a couple guys stare at her as they pass.

Trixie scowls. “Excuse me.”

“Sweet ride,” she drawls, retracting her hand from the engine. It’s her. Pearl swipes her long blonde hair over her shoulder. When she offers her hand, Trixie takes it. (After all, “No one talks to Chachki without going through Pearl.”)

“Liaison,” she says, all bored and beautiful, “Sup.”

“Mattel.”

She rests her head against her shoulder, her eyes batting slowly. “This is good work.”

“Thanks,” Trixie replies, feeling a surge of pride, “You know a lot about cars?”

She shrugs. “A little. Who are you rolling for?”

“Nobody. Myself...right now.”

“So, you’re out to cut your teeth.”

“I’m from the Midwest,” Trixie jokes, flashing a few fingers across his smile, “They need work.”

Pearl’s laugh is brief, polite. But he’ll take it.

“Gonna have to keep an eye out for you,” she says then, before she smiles and slinks away, “Good luck.”

#

When Ru finally arrives at the race, he arrives with so much fanfare that everyone forgets their alliances to fawn over him. He emerges from his stretch limo in a sharp suit and distant wave of his hand before ducking inside the Lounge. Kim and Naomi find Trixie at his car as the bosses disappear for their powwow with Ru.

Ru’s probably the most infamous kingpin this side of the world. One step above a puppet-master, one tier below a super-villian. Kim and Coulee always talk about him with stars in their eyes, in hushed voices, and it’s startling to actually see him in the flesh. Somehow, Ru’s managed to keep his hands squeaky-clean while profiting from the squabbling of lesser crime lords. He’s a real entrepreneur. An icon. And once a year, Big Bad Ru pays a visit to Liberty City to play master of ceremonies for _this_ race. This is happening. This is make-it-or-break-it.

Suddenly, Trixie doesn't feel quite as confident. He could really go for a vodka soda right about now.

Surrendering his keys to one of Ru’s lackeys, Trixie watches as his efficient entourage staggers the cars across Crowne St. 

Kim smacks his shoulder, drawing his eyes back to where Ru, Needles, and Chachki emerge from the Lounge. The crowd goes silent when Ru raises his arm. For a minute, there’s just the expectant energy of the crowd, the crackling of fire, the twang of power-lines.

“Can you count, children?” Ru asks, his voice carrying across the crowd, “I say, the future is ours...if you can count!”

There’s some applause from the crowd.

“Look what we have before us,” he sermonizes, “You’ve got Chachki’s enforcers standing next to Needles’ bikers, new blood rubbing shoulders with old pros. All styles. All colors. Nobody is wasting...nobody. That...is a miracle. And tonight, miracles are the way things ought to be! Can I get an Amen?”

The crowd responds, louder this time. Even Kim throws an “Amen!”

“This is one night where we are one gang! One family. One haus. And it’s a beautiful night for a drag race, isn’t it, my legendary children?”

Everyone’s stirred up now.

“Let’s keep the civilian casualties to a minimum and keep this race clean, kiddos,” he advises, “Be yourselves! Make us laugh! Raise hell! Can you dig it?”

The mob cheers, clinking beer bottles and smashing them to the pavement.

Ru raises his arms and his voice: “I said...Can you dig it?”

And this time, everyone—everyone—yells out, amped-up for the race, pushing toward the starting point so that Trixie feels like he’s being swept away by a current.

He weaves through the cars on Crowne and finds his ride next to a sleek white Invetero Coquette with a pearlescent finish and pink underglow. His heart sinks when he sees Pearl toss her hair over her shoulder, sliding into the driver’s seat.

Oh, fuck.

On his other side, Trixie sees a deep red Sabre Vigero with houndstooth upholstery and freaky hubcaps that resemble bloodshot eyes.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” he mumbles, watching Zamolodchikov slide clumsily across the hood, wheezing as he almost bites it on the landing.

Before Zamo can notice him, Trixie ducks into the dark cabin of his car. He switches on the utilities.

Okay. So, he’s sandwiched between both of Chachki’s prized pets. This can still work out. Beating them might impress them, might piss them off. Losing certainly won’t do either. If he wants to get on Chachki’s radar, Trixie can’t fall behind either of them. He can’t be overlooked. He can’t be forgotten.

Glancing to his right, Trixie watches Zamolodchikov light a cigarette. It’s stupid how he makes it look good. His dash-lights are gold. His smoke is gossamer. When he moves his head, Trixie turns away. His palm rests against the gear shift, fingers opening and closing over the lacquered bulb. The world narrows in on the row of open road stretched before him, on the faded white lines stitched down its spine. It’s bracketed by hazy streetlights, reflecting off the wet pavement like midnight sun-dogs.

_I can do this. I can drive. You know how to drive._

Out his open window, he hears Ru bellow over the bullhorn: “Gentlemen! Start your engines!”

Trixie turns the ignition and he hears twelve other engines roar to life. Red tail-lights scorch his eyes and he rolls up his window, cutting off the outside world, focusing on the cadence of his own breath and the way his toes twitch against the gas pedal, revving the engine, making the needle jump. His other foot rests on the clutch, steady, ready to pop any second.

When the gunshot flares in the air, Trixie lifts off the clutch and punches the gas. The force of lift-off pushes him back against the seat and he zooms forward. The adrenaline makes his blood feel light, frothy and fizzing like soda pop. It really kicks, like nothing else. He speeds ahead, fingers gripping the steering wheel, the engine roaring in his head as his eyes dart across the road, watching cars zoom across the pavement, their tires winged by misted runoff.

Two competitors—a classic blue muscle and a German make that looks like an acid trip—already have an early lead. Pearl and Zamolodchikov fight for third with Trixie still jockeyed between them. He’s forced to break every time one narrows the space beside the other and Trixie knows that if he gets clipped on this wet pavement, he’ll spin out.

If anyone bumps anyone, they’ll have to avoid disaster. And no matter what Ru says to the crowd, no one (not the drivers, not the spectators) really wants a safe, clean race.

Up ahead, Trixie sees the first turn onto Union. When the blue muscle takes the left, she hits the brake too hard. The first placer goes spiraling in the rain, cracking into the passenger side of the German car, taking both frontrunners clear off the road. The spectators barely miss the crash, cheering as they swamp the twisted wreckage with bright phones and rictus smiles. Everyone loves a disaster.

In his rearview, Trixie sees three more racers drift the curve, their headlights gaining on him as they zoom down Union. Trading airflow, the trailing cars are inching ahead, maneuvering around the cluster of cars, forcing Pearl and Zamo’s spearhead closer together. If they keep up the tension, especially around the next curve, it’ll force Trixie out of the pack.

He shifts up, jamming the pedal to the floor. They hit Nayle—the waterfront, where the bay churns black. The silver Jester pressuring Zamo’s right side uses the guard rail to their benefit, pulling ahead for a short-lived spot in first, but the Jester hits a nasty patch and hydroplanes. Headlights strobe across the pavement as she spins, spitting up a wave of dirty water that splatters against Trixie’s windshield, before the Jester careens off the road and jumps the curb.

His heart’s beating a rabbit’s pace.

Focusing on the undulating space between Pearl and Zamo, Trixie knows he’s gotta shoot the gap if he’s got any chance of making it to the front of the pack. And he’s gotta do it before they start gaining on Tudor.

He dreads it. But by some stroke of luck, Zamo pulls ahead and Trixie fills the gap next to Pearl, glancing over at her. He expects to see her anxious, on edge, like the rest of them; but she’s completely serene, almost dead behind-the-eyes as she looks over and smiles.

Trixie’s boxed in next to her. He can’t pull ahead and something’s...wrong. Something doesn’t feel right. The dash lights flicker and the odometer shivers. The engine starts sputtering, chugging so hard that Trixie can’t even diagnose the problem before he completely loses control.

Pearl. Pearl pulling back from his open hood, pulling her hand away from the motor. She fucked with something, loosened a hose or a clamp. Actual sabotage, _what the fuck_.

The power flutters. Trixie panics, hits the breaks and slides, whirling into the bayside guard-rail. It’s so fast. It’s a chaos dream. He’s gonna die; this is how he’s gonna die. The passenger glass shatters, shards of glass flying against him. The force of it knocks him around like a ragdoll, his head ricocheting off his window. Trixie sees stars, _literal fucking stars_ , as his vision fuzzes and wobbles until it’s over. It’s over. It’s still. And the engines fade away. His cabin is dark. Through the warm blood oozing over his eyelid, Trixie can make out one of the racers’ brake lights blinking in the night. They look like half-moons, like sickles, but then they fade away.

The trailing drivers race on by. Then, it’s quiet. Trixie gulps down air, tears springing to his eyes once he realizes that he’s alive. That he’s okay. And that the pounding in his skull is worse than any fucking hangover he’s ever suffered through. Gritting his teeth, Trixie stumbles out his door, his knees wobbling. Gingerly, he tries to touch his temple but winces instead, hissing through his teeth. His side hurts—aching like he’s got the bruise of the year, but he knows it won’t compare to the damage done to his baby. God, he doesn’t even wanna look at her. But, of course, he does.

Trixie whimpers at the sight of her. His passion project is completely totaled. A twisted, steaming hunk of worthless metal.

He snatches the hat off his head, crumbles it in his hands. “Fuck. Fuck.” He’s blubbering, his voice just a pitiful whine. And he feels pitiful. And foolish. And naive. Like a true boonie bumpkin. He’s fucked it up. He’s fucked it all up. The blood mixes with his tears, stinging his left eye, and the pain only gets worse once he finds his phone dashed across the pavement.

“Oh, wow,” Trixie mutters, inspecting the hunks of ruined plastic before hurling them into the bay, “Great. Just fucking...this is great. This is perfect.”

He doesn’t care if anyone sees him having a tantrum, sees how he throws like a true sissy. He fully _doesn’t_... _fucking_... _care_. Exhausted, Trixie flops against the ruined car and stares up at an empty, light-polluted sky for what feels like a long time. What’s he gonna say? What’s he gonna do?

Trixie knows it couldn’t get worse than this.

Then, he hears the gunshots.

On reflex, Trixie tries to get low but his side absolutely kills and he can barely bend without pain. Shortly after, he hears the sirens. The cops are out.

Trixie feels a slight vibration on the asphalt as cars and motorcycles zip past him, making a clean getaway from the site of the race. He tries to flag somebody down, hoping beyond hope that one of them is Naomi or Kim or both, but nobody stops for him. He’s left in an empty road, at a crime scene, as the sirens get closer and closer and closer.

Trixie can’t go to jail. He can’t. He’s self-reflective enough to know that he won’t make it in lock-up and it’s that thought pushing him to abandon the car. Clutching his side, Trixie shuffles across the street and ducks into an alleyway between two run-down tenements. They look abandoned—Trixie glances up at one alleyside window and sees a dead bird crushed between the pane and a wooden dresser—-but he hears someone inside listening to a gameshow on full blast.

_“Now let’s see what you’ve won!”_

Kicking some broken beer bottles, Trixie leans flush against the brick and deep in the shadows, trying to catch his breath again. His lungs ache from the fear and the tears and he has to figure something out. Quick. Now. Shit, is he gonna hyperventilate right now? Is this what a panic attack feels like? He’s not one to panic. He’s never been one to panic.

He can’t move.

The sirens are getting closer, echoing through the park.

Trixie hears the slow rasp of tires approaching the alley. But he sees no lights on the street. Still, with shots fired, all bets are off. Some psycho could be cruising for some extra fun and if someone really wanted to gun for him, now would be the time.

Trixie tries to push further against the wall, hold his breath. A nondescript beige sedan rolls into view. It looks like it belongs to someone who works in I.T.

The brakes chirp as the car halts in front of the alley. The window rolls down.

Trixie gulps. He can’t run. Can’t hide. And he doesn’t know how to feel, doesn’t know how to breathe, doesn’t know why it’s a relief when he sees Zamolodchikov grinning out at him.

“There you are.”

Trixie’s baffled into silence.

“Want a ride, little boy?”


	5. The Great American Pastime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, in terms of objectionable content, this chapter gets a little Dark™ and uh...listen, I’m not branding this thing as a noir for nothing. There’s violence, there’s intimidation, there’s good guys being bad and bad guys being badder.

_“Want a ride, little boy?”_

No.

Yes.

Maybe?

Trixie stares at him, a little stupefied, before he finally says, “My mama warned me about getting into cars with strange men.”

Zamo’s smile widens. “Good thing I’m a 100% biological woman then.”

Trixie has no clue how to respond to that—or to Zamo’s delighted smile—but every second he hesitates, the closer the sirens sound.

They’ll be here any second.

Looking over his shoulder at the empty road, Zamo waves his hand frantically. “Now, c’mon! C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!”

Nodding, he hobbles around the car, sliding into the passenger seat.

Trixie doesn’t know what to say. Thanks? But also no thanks?

(And why are you here?)

Listen, Trixie knows you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth but…what the hell.

Looking him over, Zamo cringes. “How’s your head?”

Awful. Horrible. Obviously.

But Trixie just shrugs.

“Haven’t had any complaints,” he croaks, shaking away the white spots flocking to the edges of his vision. Zamo laughs at that, pulling away from the curb.

As they roll down the street, his eyes dart from mirror to mirror, his shoulders hunched to his ears. A guitar wails over the radio, long and dark, steadied by deep drums and the indulgent rasp of the band’s frontman. It’s something from the ‘80s and it rings in Trixie’s head.

Glaring at the stereo speakers, Trixie dabs at the blood drying in the thicket of his brows. He still feels dazed, almost drunk, like his head’s a dead limb, like the grey matter is too swollen for his skull.

“What happened out there?”

“H-huh? Uh….”

With one hand, Zamo pats himself down, swearing when he can’t find a pack of cigarettes. He veers a little on the road. “Shit...shit…,” he mutters, completely distracted from the question, “So...what happened? Yeah, uh….”

Zamo adjusts the rear-view, checking his blind spots. “So, uh...Things are always tense between Chachki and the HHMC, right? And tonight, well….”

He tips his chin, sticks out his lower lip, and affects a voice that sounds halfway between Winston Churchill and Bela Lugosi: “ _Peace took a backseat for good, old-fashioned Revenge on this vicious, sus-picious, pernicious night in Bohan’s big fat backside._ "

Oh, wow.

So, he’s crazy. An actual crazy person. Trixie’s likely concussed, definitely vulnerable; he’s easy pickings for a maniac itching to slice n’ dice some prime cut beef. He should be inching toward the door, ready for some road rash, but...It’s weird. He doesn’t feel like Zamo’s gonna chop him up into itty-bitty pieces. Maybe it’s the way that Zamo talks—like Trixie’s In On the Joke, whatever The Joke is. It shakes up every survival instinct that Trixie’s got because he feels...okay. Calm.

Safe.

(Granted, that’s probably what Jeffrey Dahmer’s boys thought, too. He also disarmed his victims with blonde hair, green eyes, and a face that looked like he needed a full eight hours at the nearest Motel 6.)

Zamo pulls onto a shady side-street where smashed-out streetlights lace the road and sneakers dangle from the powerlines. Trixie’s head is still so heavy and overstuffed; when they hit a divot in the road, he nods with the motion of the car.

“Hey.” Zamo snaps his fingers. “Stay awake. I think...It looks like you might have a concussion and listen, if you fall asleep, that’s it! That’s a wrap.”

With an exaggerated grimace, Zamo claws at the side of his face. “You’ll leak brain fluid out your ear, paralyze half your face, and it’ll be full droop. And drool. Just big, fat, syrupy globs of _drool_ whenever you slur out your—“

“Is that what happened to you?”

Trixie winces. Even with a head injury, with his voice small and hoarse, his tongue’s still loaded. Still barbed. He sees a weakness, an opening, and he’s gotta hit it. Always. (Even when he doesn’t mean what he says. Especially when he doesn’t mean what he says.)

Now, it’s gonna get him thrown out of a car. Trixie braces for impact.

But miraculously, Zamo just cackles. He glances over at him and his eyes are bright. His smile is bright. Everything about him is bright and Trixie kinda wants to keep him that way: looked pleasantly surprised, off-guard, impressed. Trixie smiles, even though it pulls his bloodied skin too tight. He can’t help himself. And this is it, Trixie realizes, this is why the Manson girls cuddled up to the cult and wove bloody flowers into their hair.

“You fucking...You are quick,” Zamo chuckles, “What’s your name?”

Trixie pauses, unssure how much information he should release. (All things considered with the betrayal and the sabotage and the shooting and all...it’s a valid concern.)

“You can make one up,” Zamo suggests, sensing his conflict, “It’s...I mean, I don’t care.”

Trixie thinks of the nights he played dress-up with Kim, the doll he’s painted on his face, augmented onto his body, and whipped onto his scalp. He thinks of that creature swaying in his mirror and the twisted pink car steaming on the side of the road in industrial Bohan. He thinks of that name—that word—that still stings whenever he hears it in passing, remembers the greasy spray of his stepfather’s chewing tobacco whenever he spat it out through yellowed teeth. Mocked him with it. He remembers how it always made him feel so small.

He feels small now, doused with self-pity and resentment. So, that name is as fitting as anything. It’s probably the most fitting name for him right now.

“Trixie,” he sighs, lifting a hand from his knee, “Just...call me Trixie, I guess.”

Zamo mulls it over, nodding as he adjusts his cap. “Well….if you’re Trixie,” Zamo says, “you can call me... _Katya_.”

Through Zamo’s coy smile, there’s a secret. There’s another private joke. And this time, Trixie’s not supposed to get it; and for some stupid reason, he’s bothered by it.

“Ah, fuck me with a rake,” Katya mutters through clenched teeth.

Ahead, Trixie sees _red-blue-red-blue-red-blue_ strobing in distant street puddles. Any second, the cops are gonna turn onto their road. Katya cuts the wheel and pulls into a narrow alleyway, nixing the engine. The music stops. The cabin goes completely dark. Unconsciously, Trixie holds a breath as two cruisers zip down the road, lights flashing, sirens blaring, completely overlooking the stolen car parked in the alley.

Thank you, God. Or whoever.

Thank you.

Shutting his eyes, Trixie exhales, sliding lower in the seat. The rushing relief makes his entire body flush and warm and gooey, appreciative of every rag n’ bone texture, every quiet sound. He loves the sound of Katya’s breathing—the slight wheeze of it. Humming, Trixie rubs the heel of his hand against his eye.

He wants to ask, “What now? Where to?” Because he wants to go somewhere with him. Wherever he’ll take him...as long as it’s far away from this collapsed vein of road. He wants nothing more than to clean up, curl up, and then wake up to the fragrance of warm raspberry tea, the quiet circus of kiddy cartoons, the touch of dirty socks rucked up at the end of the bed.

Of course, being a natural artist-luminary-and-innovator, Trixie imagines Katya’s dark, chintzy bachelor pad somewhere downtown, decorated with tasteless art and weird knick-knacks and tacky fabrics. With all the ostentatious eccentricities of someone who gets rich quick and knows it can’t possibly last. He imagines sitting at the edge of this stranger’s bed while Katya dabs his head with a warm compress, cooing over his wound like he really cares that each touch smarts like the very first hit. He imagines Katya’s fingertips against his chin, his jaw, coaxing his head this way and that way for the perfect angle. And then the wet, hot suction of his lips beneath Trixie’s ear and an insistent palm spreading against his chest. Oh, it’s so incredibly dumb. Not to mention embarrassing, even in the privacy of his own psyche. But it’s nicer. Nicer than thinking he’s gonna die in a jagged, burning heap of metal or he’s gonna get booked and then die in prison for looking at Yahtzee the Nazi the wrong way.

Trixie startles at the red-blue lights flashing behind his eyelids, opens them to see Katya staring at the rearview.

“Shit,” he breathes, sucking at his teeth, “Shit.”

A cruiser sits at the mouth of the alleyway: blinking, silent. When the cop shuts off his lights, emerging from the car, Trixie recognizes him. It’s that Sludgie-slurping, stone-faced patrolman sitting in the lot of the RON station. He’s tall, hulking, a real-jarhead swinging his maglite around like he’s itching to crack some skulls. In a porn situation, Trixie might be into it. (Might. Might.) But right now, every instinct screams _danger_ , screams _psycho_ , screams _run_ ; and growing up the way he did, Trixie knew when to trust those instincts.

The doberman’s eyes reflect the night, like two shifting points of dark gold, and the dog presses its snout against the window, smearing snot angels over the glass.

Katya pops the glovebox. Thick scrolls of cash tumble between Trixie’s knees.

“Are you kidding me….” Trixie nudges a roll of cash with his dirty shoe, staring at a twenty-dollar bill defaced with devil horns and a monocle. Fishing it out by the rubber band, Katya chooses that roll to pocket.

“Is this...you just had all of this in your real car? How much did you leave behind?”

“Hey.”

Trixie’s eyes sweep over the small fortune at his feet.

Katya snaps his fingers. “Hey. Listen.”

Trixie focuses, meeting Katya’s intense stare, taking in the sudden severity of his face. He listens.

”Okay. Stay quiet. Stay low,” Katya instructs, emphasizing each order with a chop of his hand, “And whatever happens, do not—do not—get out of this car, Tracey.”

“Trixie.”

“Do not. Don’t do it. Alright?”

Trixie spares a look at the rearview: The cop’s flipped his holster, ambling toward the car with a hand on his belt and a spring in his step. Katya hasn’t moved. Hasn’t even blinked.

“Okay, okay, alright,” Trixie breathes out, rattling his head so hard that the white spots reappear, dizzying his vision like snow-globe glitter. He scoots lower in his seat.

“Okay,” Katya breathes, flipping down the mirror, checking his teeth. He yanks the handle of the driver-side. “Ah...fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

The door creaks open. He doesn’t shut it behind him and car chimes: _Ding, ding, ding._ The night air rustles a photograph tucked into the sun-visor: A middle-aged guy in bloodstained camo, grinning at the camera as he lifts the antlers of a trophy buck, its eyes gone milky, its tongue lolling from its snout. As Katya lifts his arms, approaching the cop, Trixie’s stomach turns. Each toll of the bell winches his intestines, twisting him inside out. An unholy fear grips him like a vice.

Sluicing through oily puddles, Katya creeps forward with his hands raised, fingers outstretched. The cop shines the maglite straight into his eyes and of course he fucking does. With this one, it’s always about power moves. He’s the type of pig that’ll flash his badge after he’s thrown the first hit, the type that gets a woody from scaring teenage girls to tears on the shoulder of the highway, the type that even the army won’t enlist. The worst kind. And Katya’s seen enough of this particular cop to last ten lifetimes—Katya’s digested enough of him to last twenty.

Katya can’t panic. He knows this. But he wants to run. His first instinct is always to run. Back in the mafiya days, when he used to work for Uncle Rico and his merry band of Bolshevik ballbusters, he used to catch so much shit for it. So much. But bitch, whenever they needed someone for the getaway, for a quick hit, to strike a match and then hit the brick, they always called on him.

Always.

But he can’t run, now. Not with that groggy-ass motherfucker dozing in the car. Worst of all, Katya likes him. He really likes him. He took a shine as soon as he saw him staring across the Interior Illusions parking lot. That’s why he hit the brakes when he saw him spin out. That’s why he came back. It’s not because Katya wants to rock his world so completely that he fucks a goddamn astigmatism into him. (He does, of course.) There’s something else. Pheromones or something. Natural scientific secretions of wild sexual witchcraft.

Animal magnetism.

If not to save his own hide, Katya’s got to see this through for Trixie. (Or whatever his name really is.) That doughy kid wouldn’t last five minutes with a juiced-up, jacked-up devil dick like Officer Pitt—and Katya specializes in dealing with devils. After all, he’s got plenty of his own demons and he dances a jig with them every other night.

Katya can only hope that Pitt’s in a playful mood; but It’s always hard to gauge with him. Especially in the rare times that Katya’s had to confront him as Zamolodchikov rather than the sexy slavic slut that pegs him in lieu of handing over hush money.

This is gonna go bad, Katya knows, any way this goes...it’s going bad. Tension cloaks the alleyway like a fucking stench—a rot—and Pitt still hasn’t lowered his flashlight. It’s blinding. Katya tries to affect a good natured laugh, something to diffuse the hostility, but he just sounds nervous and cagey and trapped.

“Officer Pitt! Is that a taser in your pocket or you just happy to see me?”

“Cut the shit, Zamo.”

Pitt’s chewing on gum. Overly casual. Like he’s holding all the winning cards. “Been some reports about street racing. A shooting. Destruction of public property.”

“The works, huh?”

“You wouldn’t have anything to say about that, would you?”

“No,” Katya stammers, squinting against the persistent light, “But I’ve got a stack of syphilitic pilgrims that just might.”

It’s hard to slather on the charm with a maglite beaming in his face and a kid bleeding out in his hotwired ride but...Katya tries anyway. He winks and smiles and sells the idea like he’s hoodwinking someone into a fucking timeshare.

“Hold it up to your ear and I bet you can hear the transatlantic slave trade.”

Emphasizing his empty hands, Katya reaches downward, squirreling into his pocket for the money. It’s a bad move.

Gun cocked, Pitt’s on top of him faster than Katya’s eyes can adjust to the dark, bullying him up against the brick. His clothes catch on the rough mortar as he fidgets for the cash.

“It’s money! Pitt! Chrissakes, it’s just...It’s just fucking money. For one goddamn second, Jesus Christ.”

Flinching, Katya watches Pitt wave his big ol’ magnum around, laughing like he’s a little kid pulling the wings off a fly. “How th’hell is a squirrely little fuck like you still alive,” he wonders aloud.

“I have a mind for crime and a body for sin or whatever,” Katya babbles, wanting more than anything to throw the money at him and scramble away, “And I know karate.”

“ _And you know karate_ ,” he repeats, throwing his head back, “You’re somethin’ else, you know that?”

Glancing at the car, Katya inhales sharply at the shadows shifting in the cabin, at the persistent ding, ding, ding of the open door. He wants to go. He wants to fight. A disgusting, frothy chowder of fear and impatience bubbles in his stomach.

“Listen, just...take the money, alright?”

But Pitt doesn’t take the money. (Pitt never just _takes the money_. He never wants the money. Pitt’s never wanted anything other than Katya’s absolute discretion in the backseat of a police cruiser.)

And now, the proposition just pisses him off. He snatches the roll of cash out of Katya’s hand, tossing it over his shoulder.

“Oh, c’mon. That’s two grand.”

“I don’t care if it’s a _hundred_ grand,” Pitt seethes, “You fucking people...throwing all your money around. Thinking you own this city. That you can get whatever you want.”

It’s always a trip when Pitt decides to play the Good Guy. At his core, he truly believes that every man is him and that he is every man. A good old-fashioned, red-blooded American boy with the tragic misfortune of being tempted by a shape-shifting demon-slut like Katya. That level of delusion belongs in the DSM-IV.

“Y’know, time’s gonna come when you scumbags won’t be able to get off free. You know that, right?”

Whenever he’s like this, Katya usually ends up playing along until Pitt succumbs to a big, sloppy blow-job. At this point, it’s almost like a script. Beat by beat, it’s always the same.

“Well, you know me, I never _get off free_ if I can help it.”

Except, this time, Katya’s not wearing the right costume for it; and suddenly, the muzzle of the gun grinds against Katya’s temple.

“God dammit. Cool off! Just...cool off,” Katya yelps, trembling a little as the cool metal presses into the thin skin.

Pitt’s so close that Katya can smell his breath: sugary blue-raspberry, a tinge of tobacco. He can see the chapped-up skin of the cop’s lower lip, the whitehead nestled in the curve of his nostril. There’s a fucked-up glimmer in his eyes, a violent inclination that Katya’s seen a thousand times before.

“You think you’re so funny. You wanna know something fucking funny,” Pitt grits out, twisting the gunpoint, “Whenever I see you without the red lips and the long hair and the fuck-me heels….”

Katya knows exactly where this is going, sees it like the track of a roller coaster. A terrible escalation. A sheer drop. A vicious corkscrew. He can see every terrible twist.

Usually, usually, Katya’s all about peace, love, and a hard cock. He’s everyone’s best fucking friend...but...sometimes….

Sometimes being nice is just too tough.

“Fuck you heels.”

“Wh-?”

“Well, far as I can recall, I’ve always been the one doing the fucking.”

Now that really trips something, just as Katya knew it would. Pitt presses the barrel harder and Katya knows it’s leaving an imprint on the side of his head. Katya never considered the possibility that Pitt would blow his head off. Brains splattered against the brick. Shit smeared against the pavement. Peanut-butter and jelly.

But...fuck. Guess this is how it’s gonna be.

Gently, Katya slips his hand into his jacket. It was good while it lasted, he thinks, and ain’t that the truth for every goddamn thing? Ain’t that the moral lesson of his entire fucked-up life? Everything ends, baby. You eat, you shit, you fuck, you die. (And then you shit again.)

He hopes Trixie isn’t watching; but, if the kid’s still conscious, Katya knows he is: Sex and Death…everyone dunks their crackers into that succulent primordial soup, whether they want to or not. Over Pitt’s ragged breathing, Katya concentrates on the hypnotic metronome of the car door— _ding, ding, ding_ —and waits.

Meanwhile, Trixie’s fully panicking. He’s never been more afraid in his entire life, watching this scene unfold in the rearview mirror. His heart thumps against his ribcage, so hard it feels like a wild bird struggling to get free. Like a canary in a coal mine, spazzing-out at the first whiff of bad air.

The cop’s got a gun, with the muzzle against Katya’s head, and Trixie’s first instinct—only instinct—is to intervene.

_I’ve got to save him. I’ve got to help him. I’ve got to. I’ve got to. I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to…._

Think.

As quietly as he can, Trixie searches for a gun, practically ransacking this piece-of-shit car. Even if it’s a stolen ride, Katya’s got to have a piece in here. He’s an actual gangster, why wouldn’t he carry a gun? That’s like...Crime 101, right? Trixie thinks on the shooting range he made back home, how he rooted through the trash for intact cans of Old Milwaukee and placed them with infinite care upon sanded down stumps and overturned waste-cans. For years, he snuck into the woods with his father’s gun and trained his eye, preparing for the day he might need to defend himself against that very man. Lucky enough, he never needed to pull the trigger. Or any trigger, actually,

Until now. (And he’s not even sure he can do it.)

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” he mutters, checking the center console and then the carriage beneath the driver seat. There’s nothing left in the glovebox but a few mismatched, self-help CDs. _Power of the Mind. Getting What You Want & Knowing You Deserve It. Holy Roller: How to Navigate the Godless World of the 21st Century._

“Are you kidding me?”

Trixie squirms around the backseat, checking the pocket of each chair. His head spins, still ringing, as he looks up and down, up and down, checking that Katya’s still alive. He’s writhing against the wall while the cop’s drawing out the fear, flexing his muscle. And Trixie’s running out of time.

Feeling around, Trixie’s fingers curl around a baseball bat hidden halfway beneath his seat. It’s not a gun. But it’s something. And he’s got no choice but to work with it.

Fishing the metal slugger out of the undercarriage, Trixie pulls it to his heart, inhaling deep before crawling across the center console and out the open door. Shielded by the door, he creeps around the hood of the car, trailing his hand against the wet metal. He peeks around the rear fender. The cop’s not facing him; and as far as he can tell, Katya hasn’t seen him yet, either. That’s good.

If this is gonna work, he’s gotta be fast. He’s gotta be accurate. He’s gotta swing hard and follow-through.

Gripping the bat, Trixie stands. He moves to the cadence of the car door, the steady ding, ding, ding guiding him forward.

Katya curls a hand around the stiletto nestled in his pocket. He pushes a finger against the edge, feeling for the bite of the blade, while Pitt power-trips in his face, screwing the gun against his head. With a steady breath, Katya pulls the knife from his pocket, takes aim….

_Crack_!

Wet. Hot. The taste of smelted pennies.

A silky string of blood splatters across Katya’s face as Pitt’s head knocks to the side. His eyes go wide and he drops.

He just... _drops_. His boot twitches against the wet asphalt.

Katya gasps, clenching the knife tight, astonished to see Trixie shoulders heaving, eyes wide, clutching a bloody baseball bat.

He never expected that.

He didn’t expect _that_.

“God. Holy shit,” Katya breathes, scampering off the brick wall, wiping his face with an open palm, “Holy shit.”

Flipping the knife closed, Katya skips over Pitt’s prone body. A pool of blood expands from his head. It doesn’t look like he’s breathing. And at this point, Katya doesn’t care to check. He’d spit on him if he could. He’d laugh. Good riddance. But he doesn’t think Trixie could handle that right now. Trixie’s rooted to that same spot, his breathing short as he stares at the body. He hasn’t moved. He hasn’t blinked. He flinches when Katya touches his shoulder, nudging him away from that dark spread of fresh-spilt DNA.

(Goddamit, his own skin cells have probably flaked off all over the goddamn place, goddammit.)

Stepping back, Trixie follows his lead, still in shock. He’s quivering all over. Gently, Katya coaxes Trixie to loosen his grip on the bat and then relieves him of it.

“Easy there, Slugger,” Katya murmurs, touching his wrist, hoping to still some of the trembling. Trixie pinches at his fingertips so hard that Katya can feel the thrum and heat of their combined pulse; and Trixie holds on until he stops shaking, until he looks down and becomes self-conscious and immediately releases Katya’s hand.

Katya swallows hard. “Hey, uh, thanks for that.”

Trixie’s voice cracks. “Is he dead?”

Yes. Definitely. Definitively. Dead as disco.

“Not sure,” Katya lies.

Finally looking away from Pitt’s corpse, Trixie stares Katya straight in the eye. Somehow, he knows he’s lying.

“Okay, yeah,” Katya amends, “he’s toast, but….”

Trixie moans, raking his hands over his head.

“But, hey! Hey. If it wasn’t you, it was gonna be me. Somebody was gonna do it. And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy, believe me.”

“Don’t make excuses for my murder, Katya, oh my God. I’ve never killed a person before!”

Katya shrugs. “I don’t know... _Person_ might be a bit of a stretch with this one.”

Trixie looks _horrified_. And Katya wants to point out the slew of laws that Trixie’s already broken, that he breaks every day; but even Katya realizes that there’s a severe moral dissonance between boosting cars and killing cops.

The first time he killed a man, Katya remembered being on the verge of tears for days while, all around him, his uncle’s rabid _vory_ clapped him on the back and tipped vodka down his throat. They welcomed him as one of their own, an official _shestyorka_ of the brotherhood. God, that sucked.

He was a fresh fifteen, a virgin even, ordered to eliminate a rabid, dope-sick bookie who routinely sold his skinny daughters to junkie kings, who chased the dragon with a relentless obsession that eclipsed every joy in his life. He lived for that honey-warm high, that deep black pearl, and he lived in filth at the edge of town, huddled-up and hurting. But that’s not why he died. Why Katya had to kill him.

He just owed Uncle Rico some money. That was it. And if Katya was ever gonna “...Make it in the family business,” his _Dyadya_ informed him, kissing his cheek, giving it a fond slap, “You need to spill a little blood for it, _moy khoroshiy_.”

After it was done, Katya remembered telling the daughters to run; and they ran screaming, dirty blonde hair streaming behind them like tattered ribbons as they sprinted into the night. Then, he took a bump, doused the dead man’s poppy-pen in kerosene and stood outside, smoking a cigarette and watching it burn. The fire felt so good.

If Trixie’s going to Hell, Katya knows he’s gonna be a few levels lower than him. He might even be in dick-sucking distance of the Big Man himself.

From inside the cruiser, Pitt’s doberman starts barking, snarling against the window as its nails _clickety-clack_ against the glass.

“C’mon. Trixie. C’mon, we gotta motor,” Katya says, pulling his arm, “We gotta get out of here.”

Katya almost expects him to argue or pull away and say, “Fuck you, fuck this, I’ll try my own luck.” Katya wouldn’t blame him. This kind of stuff changes people and it changes people in all kinds of fucked-up ways. No one walks away unscathed.

But Trixie looks at him with glassy eyes and nods. “Just get me out of here.” Turning away, he trudges back toward the car.

Katya stares down at his hand. The baseball bat drips blood, thick red blobs of dark hair and chipped bone. Damn, he really swung for the fences with that one.

Setting his hands on his hips, Katya stretches backward and cracks all the vertebrae in his spine. The moon creeps overhead, big and yellow, and Katya sighs.

This is a mess. This whole thing

A dumpster fire from start to finish.

Chachki’s gonna kill him.

And he still needs that fucking cigarette.

 


	6. Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thank yous to Dandee for beta-reading this chapter. Namaste.

Katya drives, hot-footing it out of Bohan as fast as he can without attracting attention. It’s a tall order but Katya’s accustomed to slipping the cops, looking inconspicuous as he takes the labyrinth’s course through the borough. Every few minutes, he glances over at Trixie: Gotta make sure he’s not having a nervous breakdown or something. (Katya’s something of an expert when it comes to recognizing nervous breakdowns.)

He looks okay, though. Trixie’s silent, even nodding off a little, and Katya has to push at his shoulder each time his eyes drift closed. Each time Katya does it, Trixie’s more more and more irritated, pretending he wasn’t two seconds away from sleep. It’s endearing as hell. It even makes Katya laugh. But Katya knows that the head injury coupled with a huge surge of adrenaline means Trixie’s gonna start crashing fast. He needs to eat something.

As soon as they cross the Duke’s Bay Bridge, Trixie lets out a long relieved sigh, nestling deep into his seat until Katya pulls into a gravel lot by the river, the site of a dinky little juke-joint with a neon sign that reads _Jasmine’s, Get Your Jush!_ in proud, pink cursive.

Katya parks. “Alright. Let’s get you something to eat.”

Trixie stirs, pushing himself upward in his seat; slowly, he focuses on the aluminum trailer.

“A diner?” Trixie glares at him. “You took me to a _diner_?”

“...Yeah.”

“I thought...I thought you were taking us to like...a... _safehouse_ or something.”

“You can eat. You need to eat. I’ll get you something to eat.”

“I don’t want to eat.”

“Well, I need cigarettes. So, let’s go.”

“ _You_ can go,” Trixie states, crossing his arms, nodding toward the trailer, “I’ll wait here.”

Katya groans. “Don’t be a baby, Tracey.”

“ _Trixie_ ,” he snaps, chopping his hand with each syllable, “It’s...Trick-see.”

“Okay.”

Katya blows a raspberry, reconsidering his tactics, and then grabs the bloody baseball bat from the back-seat.

“What’re you-?”

With a wink, he exits the car, twirling the bat like a majorette.

“ _Katya_...Hey!”

Sure enough, Trixie scrambles on after him as Katya sidles toward the trailer, scuffling through the gravel. Breathing hard, Trixie snatches the bat out of Katya’s hand and chucks the murder weapon into the river. Katya laughs when it plops into the dark water, sinking to the bottom of the Humboldt with all the rest of the city’s forgotten sins.

“There you go, Trixie! There you go! That’s the spirit!”

“I hate you,” Trixie breathes, laughing, “God, what is _wrong_ with you.”

“Pearl says it’s a medical mystery,” Katya says, swinging an arm around Trixie’s waist and pulling him toward the dinky aluminum trailer.

He doesn’t resist.

Inside the diner, the 2am regulars lounge in their vinyl booths. There’s the old bearded guy in a trenchcoat who always rigs the jukebox to play Led Zeppelin. (‘Dazed and Confused,’ mostly, but sometimes ‘When the Levee Breaks’ when he’s feeling sprightly.) There’s the ice man in his tattered beanie, with all ten fingers bandaged-up with Disney princesses. He’s sprawled across the seat, waiting for junkies jonesing for a pick-me-up; and for Katya, he’s always been the snake-oil charlatan chilling in the garden of Eden, bitch. Every time Katya retreats to this diner, that dealer looks up, watches him, and waits. Katya hasn’t gone for that forbidden fruit in what feels like a long, long time; but he knows it’s been much shorter than it feels.

And then there’s Trish, the idiot philosopher, and Katya’s personal favorite, nodding off in the corner, mumbling about evil.

“How’s it going, Trish?”

She looks up, her eyes all wonky and dim, one of her bamboo earrings gone. She doesn’t even know where to look, or who asked the question, when she groans into space, “Y’know, it’s whateva.”

Katya reaches across the counter, snagging a couple of menus. Then, he guides Trixie into one of the booths, the cheap vinyl squeaking under their bodies. Trixie removes his cap, digging his elbows into the formica. He rubs his hands over his scalp. He doesn’t look at the menu.

“Ugh, it’s you.”

The eponymous Jasmine hovers over the table with a tablet in her hand, dabbing her tongue with the tip of her pen. As always, she gives Katya the biggest stank face that he’s ever seen. She’s a no-nonsense, battle-hardened diva who refuses to entertain Katya’s foolishness and always doubts if he’s got the money to pay for a basket of fries. She always greets him with a raised eyebrow and pursed lips, proclaiming loud and proud that he and his ilk have “fucked up Liberty City, bottom-line, cut n’ dry.”

Katya absolutely, unabashedly, adores her.

“It’s me,” he confirms, propping up the menu.

“There’s no fried ravioli tonight. So, don’t you even ask. I don’t wanna hear it.”

With a very serious face, Katya brings his fingers to his chin. “Well then,” he says, straightening his spine, “I’d like to speak to your manager, please.”

Grumbling, Jasmine moves to snatch the menu out of Katya’s hands but he just laughs. He needs a good laugh.

“Just order,” Jasmine berates him, “The sooner you order, the sooner you can take that ass on outta here.”

Jasmine eyes Trixie up and down, taking in the bloody patch on his forehead and serving Katya a dismissive snort. Rather than comment, Katya scans the sticky laminated menu. He knows the whole thing by heart.

“Okay,” Katya clears his throat, glancing up at Trixie, “Do you have any food allergies I should be aware of?”

In answer, Trixie looks at him like he’s _completely_ nuts.

“Two cheeseburgers, hold the cheese,” Katya decides, handing over the menus, “And uh...two cups of coffee?”

“You want it black?”

“Well, I w—”

“Cause that’s how you’re gonna get it.”

With the menus tucked under her arm, Jasmine walks off.

“Isn’t she great,” Katya gushes, before bouncing out of the booth and bee-lining it toward what’s gotta be the last cigarette machine in the whole state. Drumming his fingers up the side of the machine, Katya knocks until a pack falls down the shute like a gumball. He taps the cigs against his palm, dreading the call he’s gotta make in two whole seconds.

When it comes to temper, Chachki’s got a real long fuse—but so little patience for failure that it’s practically microscopic. Someone’s gonna answer for the litany of failure that occurred tonight, whether they deserve it or not, and Katya’s not sure who it’s gonna be. Could be Pearl. Could be Ging. Could be him. Could be that

Flipping the phone open, Katya’s thumb races across the numbers.

It only rings once.

“ _What happened_.”

Chachki’s voice is dark, low and imperious; and Katya already knows that the boss has heard bad news. A cold sweat prickles up Katya’s neck. The tips of his ears burn red.

“Chaos, confusion. Buffoonery and goonery. You name it, it happened.”

All according to plan, Pearl and a handful of Katya’s best girls managed to tamper with most of the unaligned racers, detaching a hose here and loosening a clamp there, while Ginger made all the right calls, greased all the right palms, and coordinated a few hired hands to ambush Needles’ racers at the last leg of the race. But somehow, those bruisers completely flipped the script. In a second, everything fell apart. Disintegrated. _Poof_! Up in smoke, just like that.

“Somebody talked. Somebody blabbed,” Katya says into the receiver, “The cops were waiting for us, Vi. They swarmed. Swarmed!” At the sudden volume of his voice, Katya simmers down. “ _Swarmed_ ,” he repeats, whispering into the burner, “I’ve never seen anything like it. I had to ditch my car, bitch. I loved that fucking car. You know I loved that car.”

“ _If you’re good, I’ll buy you a new one._ ”

“Well, that’ll never happen, so….”

“ _That’s why I offered._ ”

Over the line, Chachki sounds clipped and cool. Never giving it away. But Katya knows the boss is pissed. Maybe even a little scared. Tonight was supposed to be the night they ended it all: the rivalry, the race, the competition. They were gonna stake their claim on Liberty City, like the Rascolovs before.

Now? Who knows. Tomorrow is uncertain. And uncertainty always makes Chachki a little...tense.

“ _Pearl slipped the cops_.”

“Good, good.” Pressing the phone against his cheek, Katya peels the wrapping off the pack of cigs, fidgeting with the plastic.

“ _I heard from Kurtie that she didn’t hit a single one of her targets_.”

“She clipped one of them. Alabama...or Aquaria...or something, I don’t know. But you know how it is, Vi,” Katya says, smacking on a cigarette, “You’re the beauty, I’m the brains, and Pearl’s...a potted plant.” He twirls the smoke between his fingers.

Chachki’s big, bold laugh is like a whip-crack over the line. It’s a good sign, Katya thinks. For his ass, at least.

#

Across the cantina, Trixie pulls his hands to his face. He steeples them beneath his nose, breathing in and shutting his eyes.

More than anything, he wants to wake up on Kim’s creaky pull-out couch, tangled in thin sheets, and blame this on Robitussin and dehydration. A bad dream. Just a fiendish, fucked-up jaunt through Wonderland chasing after a frenetic white rabbit called _Katya_. He wants to open his eyes to the peeling daisy wallpaper of her apartment and the electric stench of her busted flat-iron and the drone of the laundromat bustling below.

But he’s in far too much pain for this to be a nightmare. This much pain can only mean reality, honey, and Trixie can’t take anything back. It’s done. The time’s used, spent, and burnt out. He killed a cop.

And the fucked-up thing is: Given the chance, he’s not sure he’d do anything different.

That’s screwed-up.

“That’s so screwed up,” he whispers, his voice loud in his own head.

Jasmine skids the plates across the table and he startles. The smell of frying oil and seared beef does nothing for his upset stomach.

“You work for that long horse-face Violent Chachki, too?” Jasmine asks with a hand on her hip, eager to lend her two-cents.

“No,” Trixie answers, folding a fry into his mouth and forcing himself to swallow it down.

“Good,” Jasmine rasps, “I don’t like the air they breathe, not their slim up n’ down pole body. No ma’am. Steer clear of that hoe, you understand? It’s too late for that one.”

Jasmine points her thumb over her shoulder: Katya’s still in the corner of the diner, muttering into a flip-phone wedged between his cheek and shoulder. A cigarette dangles in the corner of his mouth while he frets with a lighter.

Trixie doesn’t ask what that means exactly. He tells himself he doesn’t want to know; but Trixie still watches Katya fidget on the phone until he turns back his way. Trixie stares at the formica until Katya slides back into the booth, bouncing on the vinyl cushion.

Balancing both the phone and the cigarette, Katya snags a ketchup bottle and tips it over his plate, slamming his heel against the butt. Sure enough, a huge glob of ketchup smothers the hamburger. Katya’s eyes go so wide that Trixie can’t help but cackle. Grinning, Katya tries to wipe the soggy bun over the fries instead.

“Nothing. Nobody. I’m at Jasmine’s,” Katya says into the receiver, sharing a conspiratorial look with Trixie before nudging his plate closer. Under Katya’s scrutiny, Trixie eats a few more fries. He even picks at the cole-slaw.

Katya squirms in his seat. “Hey, uh...hey, Vi. I gotta tell you something and you’re gonna be mad. You’re gonna be mad. I ran into Pitt…”

Trixie stops chewing.

“...and...uh... _he lost the game-show_.”

Every cell in his body tenses up, holds still for the moment that Katya locks eyes with him. Hesitating. Hesitating. Hesitating.

“Me,” Katya finally breathes, ducking his head and swiping off his hat. He rakes his hair straight-up and leaves it spiraled upward, wisped in light. It looks ridiculous. “I did,” he tells Chachki, “A baseball bat. I got rid of it. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. Alright. Alright.”

Snapping the phone shut, Katya sighs, massaging the creases in his forehead. Two of his fingernails are black with blood-blisters, the rest are meticulously trimmed and clean.

Trixie sighs. He’s so relieved, he could cry. And yet….

Smoke streams out of Katya’s nostrils, veiling the trouble etched across his face; and when he gives Trixie a wan smile, motioning again for him to eat, Trixie just feels like a kid being told _Everything’s Gonna Be Okay_ while mommy nurses a black eye with a frozen steak.

He doesn’t like it.

Trixie forces down a harsh sip of coffee. “So, are you in trouble?”

Licking the ketchup off his fingers, Katya just shrugs. “We’ll see.”

So, that means _yes_.

“You don’t have to keep sticking your neck out for me,” Trixie insists, yanking a few napkins from the dispenser and tossing them toward Katya.

Ignoring the gesture, Katya bites into the burger again. He hooks a finger in a cheap plastic ashtray. (It’s almost dainty, the way he holds a cigarette, tapping at the tip.) “You scratch my back, I scratch yours,” he explains, all casual. Like it’s the obvious answer. Common practice. Honor amongst thieves and all that.

Trixie doesn’t buy it.

“You scratched my back first,” he points out.

“ _I didn’t go to school for fucking math_ ,” Katya slurs under his breath, a puckish glint to his eyes as he nibbles on a fry. But Trixie doesn’t laugh and Katya drops the act, falling against the seat and puffing out his cheeks.

“Alright. Look, if it means that much to you, Tracey, I can call up Chachki and spill the whole awful truth. Every gruesome, grisly detail if you want. And then Chachki can decide whether it’s worth taking out a nobody prospect for offing one of the most compliant, corruptible pieces of shit in the LCPD….”

Trixie narrows his eyes.

“Or I can take a slap on the wrist. And you can take the check.” Katya smirks, motioning to the food.

“I’ll take the check,” Trixie relents.

He grins. “Good choice. Chachki’s real hot for that eye-for-an-eye, Hammurabi horseshit.”

Trixie tosses his hat aside. It’s sweaty and worn and flecked with blood. Whether it’s a thief’s blood or a cop’s blood, he can’t tell the difference. It all looks the same once it’s spilt: you can’t tell who’s living and who’s dead.

(At least none of the blood is Katya’s. And that was the whole point, right? Protecting the demented hustler that picked him up off the side of the road like a kicked puppy.)

Though he resisted the idea tooth-and-nail, Trixie’s grateful now for the shitty food. He finishes the fries, leveling out, clearing the adrenaline fog with caffeine and carbs. The plate slides out from under him, replaced with another. It’s Katya’s platter—burger demolished, fries untouched.

“Coulda told me you were vegetarian,” he mumbles, biting into the other burger. And Trixie’s too shocked that he noticed to say anything back. Instead, he watches Katya a little closer.

Katya hums as he chews. He scratches carelessly at the sparkles in the formica, chipping away at a thin fissure bolting through the table. Trixie wants to tell him to stop: You’ll make it worse. He wants to signal Jasmine for a piece of tape or a marker to fill in the blank spaces, chase Katya’s expressive fingernail as it turns a structural weakness into a mark of character. As he explores how deep the damage can go.

Trixie couldn’t repair it anyway. Not really. Not in any meaningful way. Even as a trained mechanic, Trixie’s never been as good at fixing things as he is making them look fixed. People always buy into that con: Pretty things are good things. Healthy things. Strong things. Trixie’s always been the razorblade hiding in the candy, the McMansion lording over a hill, the knockoff Barbie plucked off the dollar store shelf.

He can’t fix anything here. He can’t make any part of this night look even remotely right. Like names carved into a tree, this booth will always be theirs: Theirs is the one with the big, ugly scar.

He feels raw. Exposed. While across the booth, Katya just chomp-chomp-chomps away, like nothing is amiss. Like his own life isn’t in danger over Trixie’s crime. Mid-chew, Katya takes a swig of the coffee and exaggerates a scowl, dumping an obscene amount of sugar into the mug before ripping into a handful of creamer cups.

Trixie can’t handle it.

“What is your deal? How can you be so…? Whatever. About all this.” Trixie lowers his voice into a hiss, slamming a fingertip into the table. “There is dead cop laying in an alley back there. We didn’t even hide it.”

Katya swallows, fishing a napkin out of the dispenser. “You’re right,” he says, wiping his mouth. “We should go back for the dog. It’s trapped in that car, right? I love animals...after they’re stuffed, mostly, but still...I hate seeing ‘em die. You’re a vegetarian. You know.”

Clenching and unclenching his hands, Trixie wants to smack him. “Oh. My. God.”

“It...it gets easier, okay? Trust me.”

Trixie purses his lips. “It doesn’t get easier,” he bites back, noticing the way Katya chews the inside of his cheek, the way his jaw clenches, “Don’t tell me to trust you and then lie straight to my face.”

“Can’t bullshit a bullshitter, huh?”

“Please,” Trixie begs, splaying his hands, “Just... _be honest with me_.”

Lighting up another cigarette, Katya takes a moment and then nods.

“Okay,” he agrees, inhaling so deep that it crushes his voice on the exhale, “It doesn’t get easier. It gets worse. You’re never gonna forget it or get over it, even if you end up doing it again and again and again. But you learn to deal with it, however you gotta deal with it, and that’s the best you can do. Do you believe in karma?”

“Not really,” Trixie confesses, feeling short of breath.

“Well...That’ll help, too.”

Trixie runs his hands over his face.

“I’m a lover, not a fighter. Y’know, naturally or astrologically or whatever. So...sometimes,” Katya continues, clearing his throat, “What I do is...sometimes I, uh, gotta…I gotta see a different face in the mirror. Be somebody else. For a little while. Separate.”

He looks away. Trixie’s pretty quick on the uptake, given all that he’s heard and all that Katya’s said. He can read between the lines.

“I get that,” he affirms. And he does. (Kim thinks it’s all just dress-up. Just drunk shenanigans between friends. She’s never asked how he’s gotten so good at it, where he gets the drag, why he has it.)

“So, in the interest of honesty….”

Katya nods, encouraging him. “Yup.”

“Why did you come back for me,” Trixie asks, taking a sip from his mug, “And be honest.”

“I wanted to fuck you.”

Trixie coughs up his coffee.

“If you weren’t dead, of course,” Katya says, with a flippant wave of his cigarette, “But…eh, never say never, right?”

Trixie laughs, his voice raising an octave: “That’s it? That’s why?”

“That’s it, that’s why,” Katya laughs, “I wanted to stick my penis inside your body.”

“Oh, wow.”

“You asked for honesty.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

Katya laughs and laughs. It makes Trixie smile.

“Is this some kind of ploy,” he teases, “Are you _wining and dining_ me right now?”

“A ploy?” Katya’s eyes widen, his offended smile full of shock. (It’s actually pretty charming.) “ _Bitch_. I don’t need no ploy. I shoot straight from hip, around the corner. A ploy…please….”

Still flustered, Katya takes an indignant sip of coffee. “And what kind of rinky-dink, barnyard backwoods are you from that this….” Katya spreads his arms. “...Could be _wining and dining_?”

Trixie cackles.

“Wisconsin.”

#

It’s close to four in the morning by the time Jasmine shoos them out of the diner. As promised, Trixie pays for the meal with a few crumpled up bills and a handful of spare change. Katya leaves Jasmine a forty-dollar tip, which she pockets with a small smile and a gruff but grateful, “Thank you, baby.”

The neon lamps shut off behind them as they sidle toward the car. The bridge lights make stars in the water where the sky is too polluted to shine; and Katya yanks open the driver door, fiddling with the bushel of wires hanging beneath the wheel.

“Where am I taking you?”

“Do you mind if….”

Katya looks over his shoulder

“I need a minute,” Trixie states and Katya hesitates for a minute before nodding, ambling off toward the riverside.

Sliding into the backseat, Trixie closes his eyes. As soon as he walks through Kim’s door, he’s gonna have to recount the event of the whole night with Kim huddled up on the couch in her fluffy slippers, a smart comment perched on her tongue. He wants a shower. A nice, long, scalding shower, where he can lose himself in the steam and pretend to be clean. And then a nap. A coma.

He hears the water, lapping against levee, and the concise click of Katya’s lighter. It’s a disgusting habit, he thinks. It’s gross. Meaningless. He can smell the scorched tobacco from here. But it’s comforting that he’s not alone in this. Katya’s there and it’s comforting, somehow.

Trixie’s eyes flutter open.

The sun bakes his face. Gold light beams off the water and the chrome of Jasmine’s trailer. He inhales the bite of the river, the exhaust of the bustling city. Biting his lip, Trixie nudges the very tender goose-egg that’s formed above his brow and scratches at the dried blood trailing his face. He only realizes his mistake once the flakes fall into the seat cushions.

 _Shit_!

He fell asleep. He fell asleep in a stolen car and Katya fully let him. Heart pounding, Trixie bolts upward, almost hitting his head on the low ceiling of the sedan. Patting himself down, he’s still got his wallet, his dignity and all that. But Katya’s not in the car. 

He abandoned him. _Abandoned_ him.

Right? 

Doesn’t feel _right_.

The car door’s still swung wide open and Trixie squints into the blinding morning light. And there’s Katya, still standing by the stopbank. He’s looking out over the water, hugging himself and smoking in that delicate way of his. It’s as if he didn’t move from that one spot all night. But that can’t be true. He must have slept at some point. Did he slump himself over the wheel? Did he crawl in beside him?

Trixie scooches along the back seat, exiting the car. As soon as his feet hit the gravel, Katya turns around, smiling as Trixie shuffles toward him. Overhead, a scrawny school of gulls drift over the water, cawing. Katya tips his face up at them, salutes them with an exhale of smoke. He looks much softer in the daytime—sleepy-eyed and wreathed in sunlight, like he belongs in it. Less sleazy. Less skinny. Less spastic.

“You’re not a vegetable,” he observes, poking at his cheek, “That’s good.” His voice rasps with sleep and smoke, so quiet and fond, and it warms the pit of Trixie’s belly like a finger of cheap brandy.

“Why! Why didn’t you wake me up. You like... left me in there _all night_.”

Katya shrugs. “I didn’t go anywhere,” he says, even-keeled; and the innocence of it is like an instant tranq dart for Trixie’s temper. 

“That’s not...That’s not the point.”

“You looked like you needed it. It’s only been a couple hours, Tracey. Loosen up a little. We’re fine. You’re fine.”

“Trixie.”

“Bit of a control freak, aren’t you?”

“And you’re a freak, _period_ ,” Trixie chuffs out, pressing on his goose-egg again.

Katya’s delightful wheeze spins Trixie for a loop. He can’t ignore the stupid wibbly-wobbly feeling that makes time float for a second, turns his insides into sweet foam. It reminds him of the overcast autumns of his teenage years. His first kiss was outside a Blockbuster Video, back when he used to wear scuffed sneakers that carried the rain. When he used to bite his nails right down to the raw, red quick. He kissed a boy while straddling a mechanical pink pony with Anarchy scribbled over its big, starry eyes. He tasted the blood of his chapped lips and the sugar-dust of his Sour Patch Kids—and every molecule of his body dropped into gorgeous freefall.

Even with a gun to his head, Trixie still wouldn’t be able to recall that kid’s last name; but he fully remembers that feeling. Being truly, sincerely wanted and wanting someone just as much, and just as honestly, in return.

And despite the dead cop and the botched street race, his head injury and the crime lord who would wear his hide given the chance, Trixie’s lucid enough to know that he should be more afraid of that feeling than anything else right now.

Because when Katya looks over at him and smiles, all drowsy and sweet, Trixie feels it.

He’s got a crush on a fucking pimp.


	7. Animal Magnetism

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s the last of the flashback chapters! Did you forget we were in a flashback. Yeah? Me, too.

They’re quiet on the drive back to Kim’s place, windows cracked with Radio Broker filling the space between them. Trixie watches a ballpoint pen roll across the center console as the DJ’s slow, haughty fry floats through the stereo. He watches familiar signposts and traffic signs whizz by, anticipates each merger and exit. No surprises this time. He’s going home and the ride feels too fast.

When Katya pulls up outside Kim’s building, The Double Bubble Laundromat, Trixie doesn’t reach for the door handle. Not immediately. From inside the car, he watches the machines swirl and tumble, the people milling around inside, folding their fresh clothes into neat piles. On the second floor, Kim’s curtains rustle—she must be home.

“You’re gonna wanna lay low for a little while,” Katya says, breaking the silence, “My boss’ll take care of everything, most of everything, but….”

“Don’t do anything you wouldn’t do?”

He smiles. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

There’s an awkward silence, like at the end of date, and Trixie swallows hard. In all likelihood, he’s never gonna see Katya again; and if he does, Trixie has a feeling it’ll be at the end of something bad.

Still….his voice cracks when he says, “Thanks. For everything.”

“Yeah. sure,” Katya responds in kind, clearing his throat before he grabs the pen and peels a twenty out of his stack of bills. He scribbles something over Jackson’s long, sour face.

It’s a phone number.

“Give me a call if anything comes up. Or whatever, y’know. I won’t have this phone for long but….” He shrugs.

Nodding, Trixie pockets the bill. “Um. Yeah. Okay.”

Katya looks at him with a mixture of sympathy and regret, like Trixie’s a malnourished pussy about to get gassed...and Trixie just knows this is the last they’ll see of each other. This is it. Katya’s eyes flit to Trixie’s lips, but then he looks away, forcing a big cheery smile when the engine turns over.

“Well. Good luck,” he says.

Trixie doesn’t bother with a smile. When it comes to stuff like this, his poker face is already non-existent. “...Oh. You, too.”

Trixie gets out of the car, patting the roof a few times before Katya peels away. He rocks the arch of his foot back and forth along the crumbling concrete curb until he can’t see the junker’s tail-lights anymore. He won’t see that car ever again. Katya will ditch it somewhere, probably torch the interior...destroy any evidence of them...and that’s good. Great. Though in some weird way, it’s still bittersweet.

In the quiet days that follow, Trixie doesn’t call Katya. However, he mulls it over so often that the bill turns thin and papery between his fingertips while he stares down a keypad or a rotary wheel or a payphone lit up across the street.

If he dialed and Katya picked up, what would he say?

_“Hey, remember me? The cop-killer? So, you’re not dead. Or hospitalized...that’s good. How’s the human trafficking business? Wanna like...play some video games and fool around?”_

That’s so dumb.

He has nothing to say to Katya. He doesn’t even know his _actual_ first name. And it’s probably for the best.

Thing is: He’s never been one for one-night stands—not intentionally, anyway. He’s just too homegrown wholesome, maybe, to love ‘em and leave ‘em like that. But this really feels like one: A cherished regret for quiet reflection. (“Quiet reflection” being code for “jacking off.” Obviously.)

If nothing else, the raw trauma has certainly spiced up his spank bank. Somewhere in between sun-baked Baja bros blasted in salt n’ sand and broody delinquents huffing glue behind the bowling alley, Trixie might think about Katya.

He might pull one off to a skinny sleaze sucking on a cigarette beside a tin-can diner. Knees digging into a bed of trampled dandelions and kicked-up gravel...Katya’s jaw roughing the inside of his thighs. A lit cigarette swaying beneath Trixie’s belly button as Katya’s fingertips forest through his short-hairs. Tugging. Pulling. Kissing. Until Trixie’s head flies back against the diner, denting the sheet metal, making it _shing_ and wobble.

He dreams of Katya with kind hands and a selfish touch, perfect teeth in a nasty mouth. Giving him the type of blow-job that makes you fall in love a little, so sloppy and sweet that it makes you see stars, makes you wanna grab someone’s ears and pull them in closer.

It’s embarrassing but the fantasy makes him cum fast. That’s gotta be a common after-effect of having a near-death experience, right? At least, that’s what he tells himself after he’s done jizzing onto the broken tiles of Kim’s shower.

Eventually, Trixie finds it in himself to break Katya’s twenty dollar bill. He buys a pack of cigarettes from the smoke shop down the street from Coulee’s garage and spends his break at the scrapyard. Lighting up against the chain-link fence, he coughs down the harsh taste of tobacco, chases the menthol sweet.

God, it’s so awful. Even worse than he remembers. He stubs it out with a twist of his shoe.

Staring down at the pack of cigarettes, Trixie runs his thumb over the Surgeon General’s Warning: _DANGER! SMOKING KILLS!_ —and throws the pack into the towering junk heap at the end of the yard.

There’s nothing left for him in Liberty City. He knows it.

There’s no upward mobility, not even a race to look forward to next year. There’s just unrest, a gang war that undercuts Coulee’s business by more than half. (And somewhere on the island, the lowlife that picked him up, dusted him off. Probably catching hell and hopefully, raising some of it, too.)

Maybe he’ll go out West. To sunny Vinewood, glitzy and glamorous. He’s always wanted to see Los Santos, where beautiful plastic people live beautiful plastic lives.

#

Katya holds onto the burner phone for longer than he should…but Trixie never calls. It’s probably for the best.

If he hasn’t got the taste for scammin’ and schemin’, he’s better off pursuing a career in real-estate...or used car sales…local politics! Anything that’ll satisfy the entrepreneurial mean streak that lured him to the criminal underworld in the first place. Trixie will be fine...he hopes. It’s just a crying shame that they never got to fuck. (Not even a little bit.) Because Katya really liked that Trixie. He really, really did….

But Katya’s got to let it go. There’s bigger fish to fry now that they’ve fired up the turf war with Needles again; and Chachki has yet to ferret out the Benedict-fucking-Arnold that sold them down the river. Plus, he’s got a broken finger! The middle one, no less. The most expressive one! And it’s not healing right—oh, at all.

Bending and straightening the knuckle, Katya likes to experiment with the busted joint now that the pain has mostly subsided. It looks _disgusting_ , swollen and crooked, like a poisonous root yanked outta the ground. It looks like someone took a peashooter to the knuckle...which is _exactly_ what Someone did.

“There had to be a consequence,” Someone says behind him, sounding apologetic. Even a little repentant. But Katya knows it’s only pillowtalk: Chachki’s always gooey and tenderhearted she’s had her ass eaten and pounded out.

“I know. I know,” Katya replies, swinging his legs over the edge of Chachki’s bed, “It’s fine.”

And it is. He understands. This is how it’s done, how bosses do it. Active management. Leading by example. That’s why Violent Chachki is the kingpin of Liberty City, baby, and why Katya’s had more than his fair share of gut kicks and sucker punches for bungling a job. But, as Uncle Rico used to say, “ _Do svád'by zazhivyot,”_ a bizarre Russian idiom about wounds and weddings that loosely translates to:  _Suck it up, buttercup. You’ll live._

And make no mistake, Katya always _lives_. At this point, it’s a cosmic joke. For years, he endured his uncle’s gangbangers curling their lips at him, joking about him being a cockroach—skittering around garbage, eating shit, surviving everything. He remembers sweaty tattooed _brodaya_ slumped against each other with their chains swaying, cheeks blotchy with too much vodka. “Too bad it only takes one big boot, eh? Splat!” And a big roar of laughter. Hardy-har-har. But Katya’s still breathing. Katya’s still free. So, who’s joking now, bitch?

Katya’s fellow degenerates have never understood how scary it is to live like he does, (and _has_ , for his whole life), like he’s one minute to midnight. Like the clock hands are gummed-up on some sticky gook of Purpose that he’s gotta work out before he finally punches out. It’s like he’s meant for something, to do something, before death catches up to him. And it will. It definitely will. It always does.

He stretches the finger again, fascinated at how it twitches on its own.

Katya sees himself reflected in the misty windows of Chachki’s skyrise Algonquin suite—a giant ghost projected onto dark towers, their red antennae blinking through swaths of fog. He’s never been able to fully relax here.

Never.

He knows this place too well to get comfortable. The penthouse has got it all—every conceivable convenience, every auspicious amenity, that can mimic Good Living and Fine Taste. But Chachki’s never stocked the pantry or the medicine cabinet or the linen closet. She doesn’t eat here. Doesn’t shit here. Doesn’t sleep here.

This isn’t Frankie Malone’s home. It’s Violent Chachki’s lair. It’s a bone pile.

Katya’s seen double-crossers garroted with piano wire in the living room and sloppy informants folded into the corner of Chachki’s shower, pink water swirling down the drain. He’s seen Chachki entertain decadence, clinking frosty glasses and cutting lines of snow with big deal backsliders before twisting a suppressor onto a Saturday Night Special and popping each laughing face between the eyes. And every time they’re alone here, Katya can’t help but wonder if his time’s finally up.

From the very jump, he’s skimmed enough of Chachki’s cash to deserve a messy execution—a big, bloody crime of passion rather a quick n’ dirty shot to the head. It’s a nightmare scenario—and it plays in the back of Katya’s mind like a demented horrorshow. Always! Even when, all things considered, he’s still got a lucky spot. He still makes Vi a good profit. He makes her laugh. Makes her cum. It’s about the only insurance he’s got under Chachki’s thumb, but it’s still a whole lot better than most.

(Especially, Ginger. God, _especially_ Ginger....)

Movement in the window pane draws Katya’s attention to the svelte figure lounging behind him. Slowly, Chachki stretches against the sheets, a black ringlet dripping over her brow. She looks like the cat that got the cream, distractedly trailing a finger up her flushed chest, swirling it through cum mingling against her skin. It’s a calculated move, and so performative. But god, it’s sexy as hell.

With the boss, it’s always a thrill, always a throaty demand that Katya fuck her and fuck her _right_.

“If you treat me like the best piece of ass you’re ever gonna get,” Chachki once told him over dinner, swirling a goblet of wine, “I guarantee, I will be.”

And that’s been the gist of their tryst ever since.

Tonight, Katya had Chachki on her back, curled like a shriveled spider—legs akimbo, arms caged. He looked down into those dark eyes and grabbed a handful of dark hair and mouthed the Adam’s apple jumping in her throat. Then, he hunched his back and nailed that tight little ass so hard that Chachki’s teeth chattered. Her eyes rolled back into her skull. She drooled hot spit onto his forearm, demanding him to “Come inside. Finish in me.” And y’know what? Katya almost did.

The two of them have got heat in spades. There’s no question. No doubt. But they play an exhausting game: Katya could’ve drilled Chachki straight through the bedding, all the way to fucking China, and she still would’ve nipped his slack lips, slapped a sweaty, spunk-splattered hand to his cheek and said,“You can do better than that,” by the end of it all.

And when it comes to business? Same shit, different packaging. It’s like a psychological re-gift—but Katya likes that the boss expects the best from him. Pushes him. Believes he can do better, be better. No one ever has before. And if that means that Chachki’s gotta break a bone every now and then to remind him of it….well, that’s just the world they’re living in.

“Didn’t expect you to be so moody about a finger,” Chachki teases and Katya has to smile, take it all in stride. He topples backward, against the cool sheets, and rests his head against the jut of her collarbone.

“Look at this,” he says, presenting his crooked finger to Chachki’s face, “Look at how _disgusting_ this is. This gnarled, necrotic, purple-people-pleaser. It is grotesque, you bitch.”

“It suits you then,” Chachki laughs, wrapping a cool hand around Katya’s fist, wiggling the broken finger until he squirms. God, those nerves are alive. Like severed wires sparking across the ground.

“Yeow, bitch motherfucker! You—Y’know what you can suck?” Katya hisses, clenching his teeth, “My whole di—“

His chuckle dies in his throat as Chachki sucks the finger between her lips, a warm wet tongue suckling the damaged skin. Pulling with gentle, insistent suction. God, fuck. That’s good. Those nerves are _definitely_ still alive and Katya can’t help but sigh, shivering as Chachki releases him with an indulgent lick against the pad of his finger.

“We’ve already covered that,” Chachki purrs, “Be more original next time.”

“Ugh,” he breathes, tugging at her nipple ring just to hear her breath hitch. (He’d really like to clink it between his teeth and pull, but....) Katya airs out his hand, shaking it around. The fellated finger glistens in the low light.

He wants to stand outside in the misty AM and smoke one down over a steaming sewer grate. Maybe pick up a bagel somewhere. Poppyseed with an obscene spread of cream cheese. Go for a joyride. Play in traffic. Maybe end up parked outside that laundromat in Hackenslash. It’s a thought. He’s got options.

“I’ve got to go,” Katya mentions quietly, hoping Chachki’s amenable to the idea. Most nights, the boss has no problem kicking him out of bed and getting back to business.

Most nights.

“I could order you to stay,” Chachki teases, wrapping arm around his chest, pulling him closer. She’s being playful—Katya knows this—but his shoulders still stiffen at the implication and she gets the hint. Slinking back against the headboard, Chachki taps a foot against Katya’s side. “But that would look like special treatment.”

He holds up his mangled middle finger. “ _This_ doesn’t?”

“No,” Chachki argues, punching the word. And it’s clear by her tone that he’s not the first person to mention it. “Everyone’s punishment for that mess was _fitting_.”

“Yeah? Tell that to Minj.”

Katya got his finger broken for the trouble. Ginger…( _Jesus_ )...Chachki busted that little hobgoblin so bad that Ginger’s gonna be laid up in General for who knows how long. A punctured lung, torn meniscus, God knows what else. Probably a detached retina or something equally horrific

It feels like his fault. From the very beginning, Katya was the one who vouched for Ginger, lured him into this business with Chachki not even a month after his release from Tuckahoe. Katya pulled his old cellmate out of a cozy halfway house, out of steady gig checking out groceries in Cerveza Heights, and thrust him right back into the fold. Out of the skillet and into the frying pan. Jesus, why did he do that…?

“Ginger fucked up,” Chachki says behind him, arguing like she’s arguing with herself, “Tracking money. Buying off prospects. Vetting fall guys. That was all Ginger because that’s what Ginger _does best_ according to you two _._  But if every detail isn’t perfect, it doesn’t work. And it didn’t work because _Ginger_ was a mess. That’s it.”

Chachki springs up from the headboard, to her feet. She paces the foot of the bed like a caged panther, brimming with agitated energy—a far cry from her cum-lickin’, heavy-eyed, Queen of Sheba act.

“God, I am so sick of this being such a... _challenge_ ,” Chachki says with a joyless laugh, rolling her eyes, “I am so sick of working with people who aren’t me and trusting them to get it done the way I want it. I’m over being fucked over.”

Mid-stride, Chachki stops, raking sweaty hair away from her eyes, pulling it into a tight knot. “And _you_. You could’ve been killed, you dumb whore. I thought you might’ve been, you didn’t report back for over an hour, what the hell was that about?”

“You know what that was about.”

Pitt’s death screwed them over hard. More than Chachki will admit to him or to anyone else. Every day, the LCPD lurks outside the studio, looking for an excuse to set the siege. They’ve had to double-down on every security measure, triple every crooked cop’s payday. All because of Pitt’s power-trip. (And Trixie’s killer follow-through.)

Katya knows he shouldn’t say anything. It’s crazy to say anything. But…

“All I’m saying is…I fucked up worse than a broken finger. We both know it.”

Swallowing hard, Chachki stares at him.“You’re not right. But you’re also not _not_ right.”

He laughs, a low wheeze, “Wait, wha—?”

“I’m done talking about this,” Chachki says, cutting him off. She plucks clothes off the floor, flinging them his way. “If you feel like you need a spanking or whatever to feel better about yourself, go get it. Go pick a fight on the A-Train if you really want someone to crack your skull, but do not bring this up again.”

“Okay, okay. Got it,” Katya concedes, shimmying into his pants.

Who knows, Chachki might have a good idea in there. He’s a recovering Catholic and no stranger to misplaced feelings of guilt. Shit, the Russian Orthodoxy probably has a bigger boner for crime and punishment than Dostoyevsky ever did. So, maybe it’s time to revisit that latent sexy priest fantasy and get real weird with it—find some stuffy clergyman to give him the fire n’ brimstone treatment. For once, it might be nice to get some absolution. Hash it out with someone who won’t sell him out as soon as he shakes off all his secrets like a lice-ridden coat.

Katya’s never been as lucky as Trixie, who doesn't believe in karma. All his misdeeds sit on his tongue like a nasty flavor he can't wash down. And yeah, maybe he’s mixing metaphors and dogpiling the dogma but from what he’s seen, all of religion boils down to one basic principle: Bad girls get burnt, bitch. It all comes around.

(And there it is: an intensifying urge, like an itch for a cig, to take a ride to that laundromat in Hackenslash and pound on Trixie’s door like Quasimodo, begging for sanctuary.)

Chachki sighs, stretching a shirt over her soft, sloping rib-cage. The two of them must look like The Bone Show whenever they’re going at it: Two skeletons clickety-clacking against each other….

“I don’t play well with others,” she says softly, refusing to meet his eyes, “You know that. That’s why I keep you around. You’re no good to me cooling your heels in a hospital.”

Katya smiles, buttoning up his shirt. “Something we can agree on. Your people skills are pathetic.”

She glances at him sidelong.

“ _This_ is pathetic,” Chachki snorts, toying with the mismatched eyelets on Katya’s shirt. Sure enough, when Katya looks down, the shirt’s all askew.

“Goddammit,” he laughs under his breath, starting all over as Chachki sits beside him, helping it along.

#

Chachki’s studio, Hotlanta Pictures, sits real pretty in Southeast Broker. A remodeled textile mill, it’s cushioned by gentrified tenements and old factory warehouses that have long-evolved into trendy hookah bars and microbreweries. Nowadays, nearly everyone milling around Broker is an under-thirty, fashionably homeless, trust fund baby with horn-rimmed glasses and a killer hacky-sack collection.

(Katya keeps telling Chachki to drum up some new business and start speaking their language: free-range frottage, organic orgasms, artisanal assplay…but the boss doesn’t think it’s funny.)

South Broker is not a Shady Neighborhood, by any stretch of the imagination. Not anymore. It’s hip. Up-and-coming. And _wwwheight_. So, the newfound police presence, especially around the studio, has been like a shock to the system. Now the hipsters, usually so disconnected from reality, sipping kombucha and vaping candy clouds, are beginning to notice things. Sketchy things. Like unusual delivery hours and all the weird and wacky characters passing in and out of Chachki’s smut-shed at all-hours of the night.

Unfortunately for Katya, he _is_ one of those weird and wacky characters; and they are starting to notice him. Even in daylight. Even as he walks up the the sidewalk leading to the studio. Their eyes dart to his tasseled cap, his sunglasses, his lit cigarette. They recognize him. They know exactly where he’s going, even if they don’t know who he is by name. And it’s not good. Not good at all.

Flicking the cigarette butt to the curb, Katya peers through his shades at the two Bravado Rumpos parked across the studio, outside the gated lot. Both vans say ‘ _Nina’s Flowers’_ in fresh paint, advertising a bogus phone number with the most generic floral artwork imaginable. Obvious cops. The most obvious cops.

With all this blood in the water, Katya knows they’re gonna strike soon. They want it too bad. Sluts for justice—or their version of it, anyway.

Hitting the keypad, Katya waits for the code to clear, waving for the security camera bolted overhead. When the gate rattles open, Katya slips inside, jogging across the interior lot toward the front doors.

Hotlanta’s interior looks more like the trendy open-floor offices of Lifeinvader than a den of sin and iniquity; it’s clean and well-lit, modern and minimalistic, with glossy flat-screens and Grecian ficuses. It’s always put up a good front—until now.

From behind the receptionist desk, Pearl tosses her long silvery hair, her arm still trapped in a sling. (He’s not gonna ask her how the arm’s healing. She’s not gonna ask him about the finger.)

She cracks a smile. “Sup.”

“Where’s...I got a call?”

She tips her head back. “Yeah. Office, tiger.”

Chachki’s office looms over the main floor like a warden’s perch. Windows proofed for bullets. Walls proofed for sound. And the bitch had eyes everywhere: the lobby, the sets, the yard. It’s more than a little intimidating.

Jaunting across the floor, Katya avoids the actors milling around, throwing their arms in greeting, and takes the steps leading up to Chachki’s small office. He enters without knocking.

Standing behind the desk, Chachki rifles through stacks of invoices, stapled vouchers, and BAWSAQ notices. A pile of greenbacks tower at the ledge of the desk

“I saw our friends outside,” Katya jokes, flopping into a seat, “Did you order me flowers?”

Chachki looks up, giving him the meanest mug he’s ever seen.

Katya rears back. “Or a funeral wreath?”

“I’ve been combing through the books,” Chachki states, and Katya experiences a sheer, cold moment of panic before Chachki holds up a scribbled fast-food ticket. “How long have you been giving Max expense reports scribbled on Cluckin’ Bell receipts?”

Katya relaxes, laughing it off. “It’s not always Cluckin’ Bell,” he points out, before adding, “I use what’s on hand, Vi. They’re out-calls. Think of me as their beautiful blonde babysitter, toting them around for their _extracurriculars_.”

Unamused, Chachki squints at the receipt further. “And what are these promotions and discounts?”

“Some of those motherfuckers get hard for the coupon alone,” Katya explains, snapping his fingers.

“ _Tit-fuck Tuesdays_ , are you kidding me?”

Katya shrugs. He’s lying, of course. Blatantly. He’s not out there making firesale outlet deals with the girls’ clients. But it’s better if Chachki believes he’s peddling pussy like a white trash carpet-bagger than discovering he’s been giving them a higher cut at the end of the night.

Katya snaps one leg over the other. “There’s...a lot more to managing a bunch of whores than you think.”

“This isn’t _management_ ,” Chachki spits, crumpling the receipt, “This is a _hemorrhage_.”

Turning his fingernails into the arm of the chair, Katya can’t think of anything more to say. Chacki’s staring at him, as if down a barrel of ah gun, and Katya has the good sense to get a little nervous again.

“So, since I had _no idea_ you started clipping coupons and BOGOing blowjobs, I decided to follow up with our other rat in the LCPD,” Chachki says, “To make sure you filtered all of Pitt’s money through the proper channels. Since he’s fucking dead and his killer is still _at large_. And you wanna guess what I found out?”

Oh.

Oh. He’s dead.

The future is now and he’s a dead woman. Gone. Buried. Incinerated. Dissolved in an acid bath. The chair might as well be electric because Katya has a feeling he’s not getting out of it alive.

“Pitt told Bebe that he wasn’t _getting_ any money from you. You’ve got a silent partner.”

Chachki can’t mean Trixie—there’s no way, it’s impossible—but Katya’s mind still springs to him first, swimming in visions of back-alley brawls and Trixie getting jumped by Chachki’s goons. A swollen eye. A split-lip. A body wrapped in tarp, coiled in chains, and tossed into the Humboldt. Forgotten forever.

Chachki rounds the desk like she’s caught him in a bear trap, bleeding out on forbidden ground. The boss hasn’t got a gun, none that Katya can see, but that doesn’t mean shit.

He just hopes it’s quick because it’s sure as hell not gonna be painless.

Katya hears rumbling, a low vibration that’s got to be the blood rushing to his ears.

“So, who is she,” Chachki demands, leaning down into his space, “Who is _Katya_?”

Forget being drawn and quartered, Chachki’s definitely gonna lock him in an iron maiden and stick a C4 to the shell.

Opening his mouth, Katya hears the rumbling again. And it’s stranger this time. Invasive. More than nerves.

“Hey,” he murmurs, cocking his head, “Do you hear th-?”

The door snaps open, knocking back against the wall. Max flings himself into the room.

“Frankie! It’s Needles! They’re—”

Glass shatters somewhere in the studio, followed by a shrill scream and shouting men. There’s a crack of thunder—a shot—before Max collapses face-first on the office floor. A big, red spot flowers across his back.

Immediately, Katya jolts from the seat, slamming the door shut and flipping the deadbolt. Crouching, Chachki snatches his hand, dragging Katya around the back of the desk, keeping low.

“We’re being raided,” Katya breathes, eyes wide, “This is the raid.” Chachki’s pulse beats beneath his fingers. Like a rabbit. Even harder than his own.

“You think?” Chachki says, rolling her eyes.

“Wait. Did Max say _Needles_? Needles. Was he sure? _Now_? Needles?”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“No.”

Swiping the computer monitor, Chachki swivels the screen around and stares at the active feed. It’s a grisly grid of images. On the main floor, Needles’ leather-studded lackeys stream into the studio, shooting down known associates, forcing panicked actors to the floor.

In the grainy footage, Katya makes out Pearl slumped over the front desk….

“ _Christ_.”

The outside surveillance shows a shredded gate, a calvary of flashy hogs, and cops swarming the street, cordoning it off, hanging back with flashing lights. They’re letting the massacre go down.

“Needles bought us out,” Chachki realizes, arms trembling, watching the motorcyclists steal and smash everything she’s built here. Set-pieces. Cameras. Lighting rigs. They’re stripping beds and cracking mirrors, bouncing on mattresses while terrified crew members huddle in corners.

“There’s innocent people in here,” she says—like it’s the first time she’s seeing them as human beings rather than blast padding.

“Not to the cops. Not to the motherfuckin’ cops,” Katya sing-songs, rage knotting in his chest, “Porn stars and prostitutes aren’t innocent. They’re barely _people_. Fuck.”

Locking eyes with him, Chachki squeezes Katya’s hand and then lets go, pulling open a desk drawer and retrieving a gleaming glock with a fresh magazine. After a swift lock and load, the boss sets it on the desk, grinding her slender knuckles into the wood.

“Hey. Hey. What about me? I don’t get one?” Katya wiggles the drawer until it slips out, completely empty. His eyes go wide. “You only have one?”

With a sharp inhale, Chachki pauses before scrabbling for the cash at the end of the desk, thrusting two handfuls at Katya’s chest. Instinctively, his arms lock around the money, trying to cradle as many stacks as possible before they topple to the floor.

“Wait….”

Chachki glides past him, fiddling with the paned windows leading to the fire escape. After sliding a shutter open, she peers out the left, then the right, before turning heel.

“Go. Get out of here and run.”

“What in _the fucking hell_ —“

“Go!” Chachki sweeps a hand toward the open windows. Katya just stares, slack-jawed. Completely fucking baffled. He steps forward.

“No,” he says, as if working out a math problem, “No, that’s...That’s completely retar—Come _with_ me, you beautiful dramatic bitch!”

Shuddering, Frankie moves away from the windows, snatching up the glock on the desk, testing its weight. “I can’t.”

On the monitor, a mob of Needles’ full-patchers climb the stairs to Chachki’s office, swinging sawn-off shotguns and studded blackjacks.

Katya fidgets in that one spot like he’s gotta take a piss, glancing at the open window and then at Chachki, who looks so stoic that it’s...unnerving. Where’s that drive? The killer instinct? Where’s the unshakable confidence?

Edging toward the window, Katya struggles to hold the cash, stuffing it wherever he can. “Oh, _come on_. Come on! You gotta know, Needles is gonna juice all your delicious organs and wear your skin like a cape.”  
  
“ _I know_ ,” Chachki barks, swinging the gun, “Don’t you get it? I’m not a nobody like you. I’m too high profile. I can’t _run_.”

“Frankie….”

“Don’t make me turn this gun on you,” Chachki snaps, the sting fading with each word, “You’ve got a chance. I’m giving you one. You don’t deserve it...so, don’t _waste_ it.”

She’s serious.

This is how it all shakes down—this is how it ends—because if Katya knows anything, he knows that Frankie won’t let Needles take her alive.

And here he is, dancing on the scorched earth again. A cockroach.

He’d like to thank her. He’d like to tell her that he won’t waste his fiftieth second chance, not this time, at the expense of her life. That, despite everything, he believes they could have been friends. In another life, in a softer world.

“I’ll miss you, you rotted cunt.”

Chachki scoffs, giving him a shaky smile. “Duh,” she says, “Now, beat it, Zamo. You’re standing in my light.”

He smiles, forcing himself to turn away. He’s got to, or else he’s gonna crash Violent Chachki’s final blaze of glory, and she’d never forgive him for that.

 _Da svidania_.

He climbs outside, slipping beneath the swung panes, squinting as warm drops of orange rain hit his face and arms. On the horizon, dark clouds swamp the afternoon sun—a blown-out, fuzzy light. Peering over the railing, Katya thanks his lucky stars that no one’s milling around the old loading docks below. He scampers down the metal scaffolding, skipping a few steps when hears the commotion above, forcing him to ignore the sudden grip of pain in his chest.

Sliding on the wet metal, Katya leaps to the final layer of grating, skidding to a stop. There’s a twelve foot drop from the end of the fire-escape to the loading ramps below. He grips the wet metal scaffolding, gassing himself up for the jump. He’s gotta thank God or the floating turtle or whoever for a childhood spent watching the Olympics, eyes glued to the prize jewels of Mother Russia. He spent most of his street time copying their flips and splits and thrill-seeking, gravity-defying stunts. (With varying degrees of success.) So, with a breath, Katya springs off.

He sticks a landing on the wet pavement—“Oh, thank God,”—scattering a few bundles of cash to the ground.

He wastes no time. Sticking a wad of cash between his teeth, Katya takes off, sprinting through the warm rain. He takes all the scummy short-cuts, through gutters and torn fences and dumpster-stuffed alleyways. He runs and runs until his limbs burn boneless and numb, until it feels like he’s huffing napalm, and then he runs some more, breathing “ _do svád'by zazhivyot, do svád'by zazhivyot, do svád'by zazhivyot_ ” like a mantra, until he can’t wheeze out a single word. Until his eyes water with exertion or grief or some unholy combination of both.

It hurts bad. But _do svád'by zazhivyot_.

_You’ll live. You’ll live. You’ll live._

Don’t panic. Figure something out.

Bail out Ginger, item number one. (And if he has to hijack a wheelchair, so be it.)

Boost a ride, item number two. (And pray for low mileage.)

Book it across the country, that’s item number three.

One, two, three. Father, son, holy ghost. That’s it. That’s the plan; and yeah, it’s not a great one...but it’s the only plan he’s got.

He’ll go West, out to the tall swaying palms, to Los Santos—the farthest from Liberty he can get.

 


	8. In Rare Form

**Los Santos**  
**Present Day**

A group of teenagers chase their shadows down the Vespucci strip, their sandals slapping against the pavement as they throw down their skateboards and carve through pockets of sunburnt tourists. Crunching on trail mix, Trixie peers out of the apartment window, laughing when one of the skinny skateboarders snatches a Sludgie right out of a day-tripper’s hands. She flashes a two finger salute: Peace, dude. Any minute, the pier lights will blink on, and they’ll carry this June Gloom into a radiant dusk.

A few days ago, Katya called Ginger to confirm their interest in The Job; and true to his word, Ginger arranged a meeting with the leader of The Snakes. “It’s standard fare for you two,” Ginger assured them over the phone, “Steal a car here, torch a hideout there, pop a head here, there, everywhere. And live to tell the tale.”

Snapping the phone shut, Katya slapped Trixie’s thigh, a big Cheshire grin fixed on his face. (The last time Katya was so excited about something, Trixie almost got a staph infection….)

“Exactly like we used to! You and me. In and out, one and done,” Katya ranted, “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am!”

But they’re a long way away from their golden days: the vacations they spent plundering convenient stores strung along the coastal highway, the ten-thousand dollar weekends they spent trashing Vice City honeymoon suites.

Trixie tosses another handful of trail mix into his mouth and smiles around the burst of sweetness: A lot of candy this time. Behind him, Katya props his foot up on the arm of the sofa, lacing one shoe, then the other.

“It looks like it’s gonna rain,” Trixie observes, the ocean churning with double overheads, the clouds draping low over the beach. A gust of wind shakes the bulbs of the towering graffitied palms.

Distracted, Katya laughs. “Rain? What d’y’mean _rain_? How long have we been living here? When does it ever _rain_?”

Still, Katya comes to the window, flings an arm around Trixie’s neck, and digs his chin into his shoulder.

“You know how the sky loves to edge,” Katya murmurs, peering out, looking very serious as he inspects the clouds. His breath flutters against Trixie’s cheek, tingling around the shell of his ear. He’s warm, shellacked with sunscreen; and Trixie loves the buttery, tropical scent of him. He’s missed this closeness.

Maybe that’s why he agreed to this stupid sunset hike.

Squeezing his shoulder, Katya steps back. “We’ll be alright. Now, c’mon, c’mon. Get your shoes. It’s best when there’s still light.”

What he really wants to do is spend the next five days making Katya’s eyes cross. Like they used to.

What he really needs to do is hit up a shooting range.

In their heyday, Trixie once shot two marks with one trigger pull: The best shot she ever made. A magic bullet at twelve-hundred yards, off a cliff in the Tataviam ravine no less. And Katya squealed, jumping in her jellies, pigtails bouncing as she wrapped herself around Trixie’s back and nuzzled into her hair. She felt like the best shot in herstory; and back then, Trixie could really believe it. Back then, Katya never let her believe anything else.

Jostling the bag of trail mix cupped in his hand, Trixie tosses back another handful while Katya frets over their water bottles.

“Why don’t we stay here,” Trixie suggests, super casual, hoping Katya will take the bait, “Stay in.”

(But Katya doesn’t bite.)

Oblivious, he laughs. “And do what?”

Crunching down on a nut, Trixie levels him with a look. “And _fuck_ ,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. (Which, of course, it is.)

“Oh,” Katya utters, before it actually dawns on him, “ _Oh_!”

He reaches out a little, wringing his hands like he wants something he can’t have.

“I am loving this return to form for us…I am….” Katya babbles, “but….”

Trixie takes a step forward and Katya skitters backward, just out of reach. “But wh—hey, get back...Don’t touch me....”

Trixie cackles, keeping his distance.

It’s easy to tempt Katya. Temptation hits him like a bull; the wanting’s always always plain on his face, sweet and animal. But Trixie knows better than anyone: Once Katya digs his heels, there’s not a lot that’ll budge. Even if Katya’s delusional enough to believe that Trixie could convince him with a touch, by being too close. Trixie loves it all the same.

“We’ve got a week to get back into fighting shape,” Katya complains,“...I’d _love_ to just...You know we can’t spend this whole time jerking-off. We’ve got work to do.”

Crossing his arms, Trixie smiles. He’s actually a little proud.

“If the You from a few years ago could hear the You right now….”

“Yeah, yeah. Right back‘atcha, hoe,” Katya points out, tossing Trixie his sneakers, “We’ve rubbed off on each other.”

“We sure have.”

Katya laughs.

Kneeling, Trixie laces up his shoes. Each cross, tug, and pull reminds him of the aramid-lined corsets stored beneath the bed, dinged up from too many stray-bullets….

Too many close calls.

Ugh.

Rolling his eyes, Trixie rises from the floor, setting his hands on his hips.

“Okay,” he relents, “You win. Let’s go.”

“You won’t regret it,” Katya promises.

However, two hours later, Trixie fully regrets everything.

“How long until the pinnacle,” he pants, trying to mask the huff n’ puff in his voice as he hooks two fingers in his tank, airing it out.

His sneakers pound against packed dirt, thudding against rebellious roots, snapping dried twigs. Each step feels heavier than the last. It’s an uphill battle—literally—as Trixie trudges up the trail, following Katya in the sweltering pink gloaming.

“Five minutes,” Katya answers.

Katya said five minutes about twenty minutes ago, but Trixie doesn’t whine. Sweeping off his cap, he wipes an arm across his forehead, rubbing at an indent where the plastic snap dug into the skin.

Katya glances over his shoulder. “I thought you liked hiking! You told m—”

“I do,” Trixie argues, his laugh dry, “This isn’t a hike, _baby,_ this is...billy-goating up the side of a mountain.”

Katya just smiles, red-faced and jubilant, jump-started on that mythical runner’s high. (Trixie’s been waiting for the endorphins to kick in since mid-way up the trail; but, when it comes to being happy and feeling that way, his pleasure receptors have always been like a shitty arcade claw machine, grasping at cheap plushies that everyone else can just pick up at a 99 cent store. Seasonal allergies and major depression...girl, he travels his own Trail of Tears.)

“I don’t understand why you won’t just go to the gym,” Trixie says, breathless.

“ _That’s ‘cause ya ain’t ne’er been to prison, bitch_ ,” Katya answers, affecting a syrupy Southern drawl that makes Trixie laugh.

“Enjoy the view,” Katya suggests, “We’re almost there. I promise.”

Trixie has to admit: The view is spectacular. The trail winds along the bluff that shadows the iconic Vinewood sign, overlooking the Los Santos sprawl. A blade of purple light hovers along the horizon where the sky bleeds pink and red, scored by milky contrails from LSX. It’s quiet up here—it’s maybe the quietest spot in all of tinseltown—and Trixie takes a moment to enjoy the wind rustling the brush and the steady sound of Katya’s breathing as he continues up the trail.

Trixie motivates himself by focusing on the back of Katya’s legs, at the lines of lean muscle, and the movement of his small, compact ass. It’s fairly inspirational. He doesn’t get this view very often—not as much as he’d like, anyway. Even on this very trail, Trixie insisted on leading the way. And for a time, Katya let him, even though he’s far and away more familiar with the hike. 

Y’know, when Trixie first arrived in LS, he could barely scrape by: He worked odd jobs at all hours, always on the move, busting his ass. He never intended to embark on a fitness journey; but, by the time he ran into Katya again, he’d trimmed most of the baby fat. He crystallized into a young beefcake, pulsing with life. (And that is factual.) But exercising for the sake of exercise? For the hell of it? The _fun_ of it?

He used to think of himself as being fairly athletic before he started living with Katya, who wakes up every morning by twisting his body into a pretzel and performs random acrobatics while in public, who takes evening jogs because they ‘feel good.’ 

When Trixie finally sees the hillcrest, he gets his second wind. Jogging up behind Katya, he plants his hands between Katya’s shoulder blades, pushing and picking up speed. Katya laughs as the two of them flail toward the rest area and then break apart, kicking up dust.

Brushing past Katya, Trixie catches his breath, wandering toward the overlook. From up here, the lights of Los Santos look like a pile of scattered jewels—and the darker it gets, the more beautiful they look. The evening breeze cools his flushed skin and with each fresh inhale, Trixie’s lungs settle into a euphoric, calming tempo.

“Hey, come over here,” he says, waving a hand, still staring over the hills, “You were right. This view is….”

“ _Kthyeeeeethhaaaaa_ …. _Kthyeeeeethhaaaaa_ ….”

Trixie turns around. Katya’s squatting in the dirt, hands braced on his thighs, breathing through his tubed tongue.

“Oh my God,” Trixie laughs.

“ _Kthyeee_ …What?”

“What is that?”

“A cooling breath,” he explains, “Try it. C’mon. It’s real.”

(The things you do for love....)

Trixie joins Katya on the ground, resting his forearms on his thighs. He takes an experimental breath through his curled tongue, exhaling with little effect. With a wave of his hand, Katya encourages him to continue trying.

“Do more. Tibetan monks use this technique.”

“Why would Tibetan monks need a cooling breath in the Himalayas,” Trixie challenges, even as he inhale-exhales again.

“If you ever used your living organism as a purifying conduit for the electrifying, multiplying, toxifying energies of a hostile and uncaring universe, you might get a little hot under the collar, too,” Katya argues.

“Purifying conduit? Oh honey, I purify my con—“ Trixie stops himself, even as Katya begins to snort and laugh in anticipation of the juvenile punchline.

He has an idea. “You know what we should do this week?”

Katya stops for a moment. “Fight? Do you wanna fight? Oh, please. Trixie. Let’s fight.”

Flopping his arms, Trixie sighs. God, it’s like magic sometimes. So magic that sometimes he feels bad for other people for not being _Them_.

“Yes! That’s exactly...Yes,” Trixie says, swaying into his shoulder, sighing with all the love in the world, “Let’s fight.”

#

It’s 7am and dusty morning light spills through the grated windows of Milk’s Muscle, a little gym in La Puerta that owes Trixie a big favor.

See, the proprietor of the gym, Miss Big n’ Milky herself, is an iron maiden, lady Atlas with a weakness for small dogs and their canine tranquilizers. When he first moved to LS, Trixie worked as a vet tech for a hot minute; he sold Milk extra vials of phenobarbital at well below market price. A few private hours at the gym isn’t much to ask in return, even if Katya insists on calling it a “dojo.”

But now that he’s here, Trixie feels a little ripped-off. It’s musty, worn-down, lived-in. A real dump. The central mat’s stained with dark patches of blood. Leather speed bags dangle from the ceiling like shriveled dates and rings of duct tape tourniquet the heavy tower bags hovering above the cement floors.

Katya follows him inside, grunting as the heavy door shuts behind them.

“I’ve been fucked beside dumpsters that’ve smelled better than this,” Katya says, throwing his gym bag aside.

“And you call _me_ a priss.”

“ _Who loves_ ,” he warbles off-key, “ _to drink piss…._ ”

Tamping down a smile, Trixie rolls his hands in boxing tape, nodding sagely.

“Y’know, I’m glad we’re doing this? This is a long time coming.”

Trixie throws the gauze at Katya, who twirls it around his finger before unraveling the tape. He loops it around his knuckles, testing the give.

“Careful what you wish for, mama,” Katya warns, “My bones are solid. There’s a hard, scaly, impenetrable crust….” He runs his hands down his chest for effect. “I have an exoskeleton...on the inside.”

“No. It’s definitely on the outside,”

Trixie cackles, shucking his shoes as Katya ambles onto the mat.

“That is psoriasis, you villain,” he laughs, looping the gauze around his knuckles, testing the give, “You better buckle up, buttercup, because I am going to waste you. I know karate.”

“I have never once seen you do Kung-Fu,” Trixie points out, as they square-off at opposite ends of the mat, “Not one time.”

“Karate. Kyokushinkai _karate_.”

Trixie can’t even remember the last time he went toe-to-toe with anyone.

It’s hard to remember the last time he saw Katya _throw a punch_.

It must’ve been one of the very last jobs they tried to run, when The Squirrelfriends blindsided them en route to a hit. When they fully drove them off the road and chased them, on foot, right into the thick of the Chinatown warrens.

Trixie remembers Katya dragging her by the hand through a touristy street bazaar spangled with paper lanterns and glowing serpentine dragons. Their curled whiskers blinked like Christmas lights; and all around, vendors haggled in broken streams, hocking cheap baubles and fatty food.

They’ve never been inconspicuous in a crowd. Drag’s not exactly subtle and subtlety isn’t their style, anyway. But Chinatown didn’t give a shit about a pair of roughed-up crossdressers squeezing through the hoard. Further down the street, Detox’s Dennis-the-Menace highlighter hair bobbed through the crowd as he searched them out. Trixie remembers locking eyes, Detox aiming a gun down the line, and opening fire.

Beside Trixie’s head, a squawking chicken exploded in its cage, white feathers flying out like a firecracker. Panicked, the crowd scattered like swaths of frenzied fish while Detox cut down the middle like a moray eel. Arm straight, eyes resolved, popping off another round as Katya pulled Trixie further down the cramped street and returned fire.

They squeezed off ammo like it was _nothing_ , a hail of chaotic gunfire ripping through food stands and popping the neon scribble, spouting white sparks and shards of glass.

Trixie can remember the burn of her arm as she swung her bat, knocking over food-stands and mock-up stalls in a flurry of movement, snatching up counterfeit _Shanel_ and _Valentina_. They blind-fired into the darkened street until their trigger-pulls went dry and hid behind two upturned kiosks at either side of road, waiting. Trixie readied her bat, Katya slipped her brass knuckles; and as soon as Detox prowled across the threshold, into view, Trixie shot out and swung low at his knees. Katya leapt to strike, whaling their pursuer right across the jaw.

It was a good jab. Trixie remembers that hard, quick crack sending Detox sprawling across the littered asphalt, into a puddle of something that definitely _wasn’t_ rain.

Katya knows how to fight. And Trixie’s got a feeling that it’s not from palling around with Uncle Rico in front of the family television, wax-on-wax-off, trading karate-chops and roundhouse kicks.

“So…my dearest, darling doll,” Katya taunts from across the mat, shimmying his shoulders, “Wanna make a wager?”

Trixie locks his fingers behind his head. “Whaddya wanna bet?”

“Ah, I don’t know.” Katya shrugs, carefree. “Whatever you want. Dream a little dream for me.”

Lately, Trixie’s dreamt of a safe, warm cabin filled with gentle music—a spot all his own, cushioned by miles of virgin snow, glittering in overcast. An end road. A life of secret, quiet abundance. And Katya’s there, barefoot, maybe bearded, wheezing at their inevitable TV special, all lurid and luscious, with beautiful boys and bad reenactments. And they’re happy. Trixie’s happy and Katya’s always there.

“If I win, whatever we get out of this, or whatever we decide to do after it,” Trixie says, “We leave Los Santos for good.”

He half-expects Katya to argue it down. If you let him, Katya will go full-moon, hippy-dippy druid in two-seconds flat about California’s ‘natural beauty’—its unnatural beauty, too, if they happen to be strolling through Vinewood. But Trixie knows thar Katya only likes Los Santos so much because it doesn’t look like Liberty City. Because it doesn’t look like home.

But Katya doesn’t bargain.

“I’ll take that bet,” he says, all light and breezy.

“You will?”

“I will. _Now grab yer ankles and kiss that big ol’ can goodby_ e.”

Katya bounces on the mat, angling his stance. He looks more like a featherweight than a ninja, reminding Trixie of the often sharp dissonance between what Katya says and what Katya ends up doing. But Trixie’s drawn Katya’s wildcard more than anyone; and more than anyone, Trixie knows exactly how to play it.

Trixie spaces his feet and curls his fists, game face on. There’s something on the line, now. Something way bigger than paying for brunch or folding the laundry.

With a shared glance, they both lunge forward, meeting in the middle. Huddling, Trixie swings first, aiming for Katya’s ribs. But Katya’s so goddamn light on his feet, he side-steps out of the blow. They dance around each other, trading weak hooks and soft uppercuts, wearing down their stamina, waiting for an opening to exploit.

(They know each other’s weaknesses more than anyone; and more than anyone, they know exactly where to find them.)

More than anything else, Trixie’s worried about Katya’s legs: They’re powerful. And Trixie watched, in horror, as Katya shotgunned a quad this morning; so, Trixie knows that Katya wants to flail his limbs, discharge all that energy, and _kick_. Hard. So, when Katya pivots to sweep Trixie off his feet, Trixie breaks his form instead. He lowers his head and rushes Katya, tackling him flat against the mat with a heavy “oomph.” Trixie lands on top, trapping Katya’s arms against his chest.

The force of the charge kicks up dust from the old mat. It looks like fool’s gold in the scum-filtered sunlight, drifting around Katya’s head like a dreamy blonde cloud. He’s breathing heavy, and Trixie can smell the tang of coffee lingering on his breath.

He won. 

Katya’s eyes dart around, catching his bearings. He looks shocked but delighted all the same, and that’s when Trixie finally glimpses Her peeking out from behind Katya’s eyes: The bright, red scare with the long blonde hair. Beaming, fevered, and forceful. Blown-out in black.

It’s the first he’s seen Her since that night in Chinatown, running from the scene, Detox knocked-out in the street. Katya stormed into her favorite slopshop, batting away the alarmed staff behind the counter as she dragged Trixie through back kitchen. They raced through swaths of steam, thick with hoisin and ginger, ignoring the shouting line-cooks as they barreled out the back door, into a thin alley.

They were breathless, bent over and laughing, hooking their fingers as they wobbled against each other, buzzing with adrenaline. Trixie’s bat clunked against the street, rolling into piles of mismatched trash, and they collided in panting, grinning kisses—lips waxy with smudged lipstick, dewy with sweat.

Trixie’s never really liked fooling around in geish. It’s too much like a mask. Too separate from reality. But that night, she let the fantasy rush over her. She let Katya walk her back against the brick. She didn’t mind the harsh grain catching at her back, her hair, her flower crown. She let herself want it all, gripping Katya’s hands and pivoting them, crushing her against the wall.

Trixie remembers the point of her septum digging into her cupid’s bow and Katya beaming up at her, her laughter low and smoky as she nibbled at Trixie’s lower lip, glistening with spit.

That night, Trixie felt so alive that she didn’t notice the pain in her side until well-after the incident, tucked away in the bathroom of a Skid Row safe-house while Ginger and Katya argued about the botched job in the den. Teary-eyed, Trixie rucked up her frilly nightgown, wincing at the bullet lodged in her corset, prying it out with the point of a knife. It clinked in the sink bowl, rolling around the drain, and Trixie snatched it up like an errant wedding ring, stared at the bullet in her palm for a long time.

She never told Katya.

They didn’t run many of Ginger’s jobs after the Chinatown incident. A handful, maybe. But, each time, the Squirrelfriends ran up on them. Each time, they had to run. Each time, it got worse. It got much closer. Inching toward a statistical tragedy that they could only resolve by cutting themselves off from that world.

And they’re going back.

“Are you nervous?” Katya asks, his soft tenor bringing Trixie back to the warm body trapped beneath him, breathing heavy on the mat.

“Yeah,” Trixie admits, relieved by it. His thighs squeeze against Katya’s ribs a little and Katya smiles, looking so serene that Trixie knows he’s anxious, too.

Gripping the meat of Trixie’s thigh, Katya caterwauls, rocking his hips upward, jostling him around.

“Guess that’s it then,” Katya breathes, cheeks flushed, grinning up at him, “Goodbye, Los Santos.”

Trixie kisses him once, sealing the deal.

Goodbye, Los Santos.

Trixie smiles when he feels Katya’s contented hum deep in his chest, vibrating against his lips. Katya doesn’t look like someone who just lost a bet. He looks like someone who’s never lost anything at all—the luckiest woman in the world.


	9. White Widow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's a sex in this. You have been notified.

Trixie’s eyes flutter open. It’s early. Dark and blue. The sun’s not up yet, neither are the gulls. He can’t hear voices, or sirens, or the rasp of tires. Just the gentle crash of the Pacific, plunging the world into a deep, vulnerable quiet, out of time, like a scene rendered in a snow-globe, hidden in the whorls of a shell. Trixie presses an ear against his pillow, watching Katya slowly open one bleary eye, then the other. His small, languid smile wakes Trixie up a bit, makes his heart lift and spin and light up like the Wonder Wheel on a summer night. Funny, how that still happens….

Pushing himself up, Katya clutches the headboard, twisting around to peer outside.

“It’s quiet,” he whispers, his voice hoarse with sleep.

Trixie can’t resist: “Too quiet.”

Katya lean against the headboard. “It’s...nice,” he says, as if he’s really _noticing_.

“Yeah,” Trixie says, sitting up, draping the blanket around his bare shoulders, “It really is.”

In some weird way, it feels like the morning belongs to them, that they’ve inherited it by virtue of being the ones awake.

“It’s our big day,” Katya whispers, glancing at him sidelong. Trixie wants to say something encouraging, something enthusiastic, because he knows Katya wants to hear it. Truth be told, whenever it comes to giving Katya what he wants, Trixie always ends up accommodating him one way or another. Accompanying him on the road to ruin. After all, what’s a yin without a yang? Siegfried without a Roy? If Trixie’s the space cowboy, then Katya’s the gangster of love: That’s just the tune of it. What they’ve got, what they’ve done, what they are: That’s legendary.

But right now, Trixie’s far away from all that. Instead, he sees them floating toward the event horizon, about to cross the threshold into Willy Wonka’s Tunnel of Terror: a singularity of flashing lights and dark rapids. And those waters are gonna get real rough, real quick. They might not survive the ride and that’s just facts, America.

One time, while gutting a whitetail in the garage, his dad fed him some bullshit line about warriors going into battle with the mantra that they’re dead already. “Because dead men don’t feel fear,” he’d said, dropping oodles of squirming intestines into the slop bucket, his forearms soaked in blood. But even then, as a kid, Trixie didn’t buy it. What the fuck did his dad know about going to battle? What did he know about fighting for anything or _anyone_?

For a while, Trixie thought he could parse the subtle but crucial difference between a man who commits violence and a man who is violent, who sprouts from a blackened seed. He used to think pleasure was the great moral divider. Then, money. Then, love. Now, he’s not sure whether a line exists at all; because Trixie _wants_ to squeeze off a few rounds, raise hell one last time, but he’ll be happier once it’s all said and done. He’ll be happy when they cash a check, fat and rare and bloody, and finally leave this city behind.

With a sudden “Oh!,” Katya startles Trixie back to the present,  “I got us something.”

Holding up a finger, Katya leans over the side of the bed, searching for his ‘special treat’ or whatever. Trixie’s not surprised when he can’t find it. He’s even less surprised by the exasperated “shit” and frustrated flashing of Katya’s hands as he continues to look.

His obliques emerge with every disheartened exhale, laboring against his skin, and Trixie has half a mind to tell him, “Forget it,” and pull him back, pin him down, make him his own personal mission. The idea gets heavier the more he stares.

“Ah, ha!”

Triumphant, Katya turns back, brandishing a pearl of a blunt between two fingers. “I knew I had some wacky-tobacky squirreled away for the occasion.”

Trixie laughs. “Since when do you need _an occasion_?”

“Since a packs of cigs started costing me fifteen bucks.  Jesus, don’t get me started.”

Katya flicks a Zippo, holding the flame until an ember flashes red and a thick stream of earthy smoke curls from the tip like burnt incense. He passes to Trixie, who takes it in with a cough. (He always coughs.)

“Just quit already,” Trixie says, real easy, just to ruffle his feathers a bit.

“Don’t tell me I need to quit. I know I need to quit. I know.”

“Just...dying from lung cancer is such a lame way to go out. Especially for a full garbage person like you.”

“Oh! You know what I want? I’ll tell you what I want.” Grinning, Katya points three fingers to his chest. “Three shots to the clavicle. Legs, chopped up. _Brrrrip_. An explosion. I’d love to be decapitated.”

Trixie laughs, bogarting another hit. “You’re always talking about separating the body from the mind....”

“How do you think I’m gonna die?”

Ugh. No. Fuck. This is exactly the kind of conversation he didn’t want to have today. Or like... _ever._

Trixie coughs, burning his throat. “I don’t,” he gasps, passing the joint.

“Oh, come on,” Katya says around a mouthful of smoke.

Trixie knows Katya’s just having fun, permitting his errant thoughts to get whimsically morbid...but Trixie hates it. He doesn’t want to think about Katya dying, especially now, stoned to hell, when his thoughts are raw and bright and halfway imaginary already. Even when they’re on a job, riding the wave of their own havoc, Trixie just prefers to believe that Katya’s immortal. Suicidally indestructible. Like a witch that slips the noose over and over and over just because it’s the funniest trick to play.

It’s the only way Trixie can get the job done.

Katya knocks their shoulders. “So? C’mon, how do you see it?”

Trixie plays dumb. “See what?”

But Katya doesn’t let it go. “Me dying.”

Trixie takes a third toke, a hard pull, before he passes it back. He wants to tell Katya that he hopes they go out just like this: Lounging in bed on a hushed morning, a pair of dried-up old fruits dangling on a vine, passing White Widow back and forth between them until there’s a _hush_ and then, they _don’t._ But he swallows it down with another deep inhale of smoke and feels his head float, all lazy-hazy, a smile melting some of that urgency away. He wishes the smoke could say it all for him—like the blue caterpillar lounging on his toadstool, blowing candy-colored rings into Alice’s face, asking: “Who _are_ you?”

“In bed,” Trixie states with some authority, “Next to me.”

Katya smirks, opening his mouth.

“Warm,” Trixie says, cutting him off before he says something stupid and perverted and meaningless, “In your sleep. Old. That’s how I see it, okay?”

Katya blinks, looking dumbstruck, as if he’s never once considered that possibility for himself. “Yeah,” he says, pulling his knees up, ashing off the side of the bed, “I guess that’d be nice, too.”

“I don’t wanna talk about death with you, I don’t,” Trixie sighs, “Why do you always wanna talk about death?”

“ _Because death’s the Business, baby_ ,” Katya reasons, before pouncing up over the sheets to face him. The suddenness makes Trixie laugh and Katya leans in, inching closer to his face, his grin wide, “Tell me, Miss Mattel, where do you see yourself in five years? Would you like to set up a 401K? Review your _benefits_? Don’t you have _any_ passion for your work?”

Snuffing the roach on the headboard, Katya leans in even closer, taking up Trixie’s vision like he always does. His bloodshot eyes flicker downward, blond eyelashes twitching a little as he stares at Trixie’s lips, mulling them over. And honestly, this is the kind of morning discussion Trixie would much rather have.

“Bad news to mix business and pleasure,” Trixie taunts, his shoulders sinking against the headboard, luring Katya closer, “That’s what they say.”

“Is that what they say? I must be going at this _all wrong...._ ” He trails off, distracted, gripping Trixie’s arm.

“I want to blow you,” Katya states, matter-of-fact, “I would like that very much.”

Trixie barks with laughter. Katya’s idiot-savant approach _still_ takes him aback; at this point, he thinks it always will. Katya beams, staring at him with wide, pink-fuzzed eyes for what feels like a _very_ long time. Trixie’s already pretty restless below the sheet. His legs shift a little and his hand hovers around his lower belly, fingertips tugging at folds of fabric that move against his hips in just the right way. Listen, he doesn’t partake in The Weed very often but whenever he does, he _always_ gets inconsolably, irrevocably horny. We’re talking a...tenth grade, shirts versus skins, farm-boy musk-mash...kind of horny.

And Katya knows that.

But he’s still just staring, waiting for an invitation like he always fucking does. It honestly drives Trixie crazy. He hopes Katya never stops doing it.

“Yes,” Trixie huffs in a rush, pushing at Katya’s shoulders, “Yeah, yes, go. _Go._ Do it.”

With a gleeful whine, Katya ducks beneath the blanket. The thin sheet fluttering down as he grabs Trixie’s thighs, settling between his legs and staring at Trixie’s heavy erection with such a prehistoric kind of hunger that it scares him a little bit. Makes him even harder. He bites back a moan of anticipation. He really wants to watch him take it deep, see his dick bulge against the inside of Katya’s cheek, admire the bobbing gulp of his unshaven throat. He wants to feel Katya hands grabbing everywhere, anywhere he wants.

Trixie pulls at the thin blanket but Katya snatches his wrist, stalling him from ripping it clear off and tossing the sheet to the floor. It settles on top of Katya’s head, cloaking him like a childhood ghost.

“Are you kidding me? _Why,_ ” Trixie laughs, genuinely baffled.

The ghost shrugs. “Why not?”  

Ready to retort, Trixie stops short when Katya clutches his thighs, his fingers playing with the hair there. Trixie melts against the mattress, his hand drifting over the dome of Katya’s covered head.

“Lie back and think of...somewhere nice,” Katya says, muffled beneath the sheet, “...paradise.”

Trixie snorts. “ _Paradise_?”

“Wherever you want,” Katya breathes, so softly that Trixie barely makes out the words before Katya bites down on the meat of his inner thigh, sucking at the skin until Trixie chokes on his own breath. God, fuck paradise...the only place he wants to be is right here, right now.

“Wait. Hold on. I can’t…” Katya wheezes under the sheet. “I can’t spit, my mouth...my mouth is so dry.”

Impatient, Trixie wiggles his legs. “Oh. That bodes real well.”

Grabbing a glass of warm water from the bed-stand, Trixie delivers the cup underneath the sheet. “Here.” Nodding, Katya takes a big, grateful sip and then hands it back.

Trixie twists a little to return the glass to the headstand but then loses his grip, and all sense of gravity, as Katya grabs at his love-handles and pulls him down, close like a meal, flush against the mattress. Shuddering, Trixie lets the glass teeter on the ledge until it falls, shattering to the floor as his hands fly downward, wandering everywhere and nowhere, over the vague shapes of Katya’s head and shoulders as he spreads his ass with a soft grunt.

Trixie’s head falls back, crushing his ears against the pillow, lost in the feverish touch of Katya’s lips and the hard slide of his nose, the hot wet pull of his mouth, the way he jacks him with a grasp so fucking firm and possessive that Trixie’s close to begging for something even rougher.

He makes a strangled noise caught in the roof of his mouth, in the scoop of his tongue, as his hips cant upward. He bites at his lower lip until it goes numb, his spine spasming when Katya’s slippery fingers tickle at his taint, his thumb pressing a hard spiral against his asshole. And fuck, Trixie wants to bear down just as much as he wants to pull Katya’s ears and buck up into his wild mouth, hold his head in his lap and really give it.

Katya emerges from under the sheet. Trixie’s eyes shoot open, seeing him pink-faced, gulping down air, smiling down at him. He raps his knuckles against Katya’s sweaty shoulder.

“What are you doing,” Trixie reprimands, gasping, “Why did you _stop,_ wha—”

For once, Katya cuts him off—smothering him in a kiss that never ends. Trixie loses his breath at the merciless pump of his hand and then at the fingers that close around his throat. He loves this and Katya never makes him ask. His Adam’s Apple trembling against Katya’s sweaty palm, his moan nothing more than a lightheaded hiccup into his lover’s mouth.

Honestly, screw that other thing about getting old and dying quietly, this is how he’d like it done. Secretly. Truly.

“I need the full story about this one day,” Katya says, planting a tender kiss against Trixie’s gasping lips.

Trixie holds his wrist there. He traces the veins popping along the back of Katya’s hand.  “H-how do you know th-here’s a story?”

“‘Cuz there’s _always_ a story.”

Trixie feels him hard and hot against his hip, dribbling pre-cum, desperate for friction. He grabs a handful Katya’s ass, his fingers slipping when Katya suddenly pulls away and ducks beneath the covers again—slurping him down, working him over until Trixie just writhes _,_  blacking out for a second as a white-hot filament of pure pleasure wracks his entire frame.

By the time he opens his eyes, all heavy, he notices that the sun’s started to rise. Shadows ripple against the far wall—dark, gold-piped palm trees—and he’s still heaving, coming back to himself, when Katya resurfaces for another kiss. Of course, Trixie wants to kiss him. He thinks nothing of it until Katya’s laugh rumbles against his chest and Trixie tastes a warm, salty syrupy…

“O-oh my God,” he sputters, spitting up a string of his own fucking jizz. Frantically, he wipes it from his chin while Katya laughs, sucking on his teeth and swallowing what’s leftover. Trixie pushes him off and Katya rolls to the side, still hissing with laughter as he absently plays with his own cock.

And y’know what, If that’s how he’s willing to play it, then Trixie’s more than willing to let him squirm a little, make him wait.

“You’re the reason we live like animals. I hope you know that.”

“We _are_ animals, dah-ling,” Katya retorts, like he’s performing Tennessee Williams to their water-damaged ceiling. He glances over and smacks Trixie’s cheek. It stings a little.

“Aww, like you’ve never tasted cum before….”

“Not my own!”

“You _haven’t_?”

Rearing back, Trixie's voice raises an octave. “You _have_?!”

“It’s _responsible,_ ” Katya says, “Gotta know what you’re dishin’ to the public, mama.”

“Wow. How magnanimous of you.”

Turning over, Trixie looms over Katya, staring down at him. His finger chases a trail of sweat down Katya’s flushed temple. He smiles.

“So,” Katya murmurs, “How’d you like the taste of your own medicine?”

Trixie presses their foreheads together. “I like yours better.”

Katya grins, wiggling a bit underneath him. His big bright grin fills Trixie’s vision again. It’s everything he sees. Inches his way down, Trixie presses a few lazy kisses against his sternum. “Let’s get you off now, huh?”  

“Yes, yes,” Katya breathes, nodding his head like Trixie’s been torturing him for a day and night, “Yes. Let’s.”

As they come down, shoulder-to-shoulder, lazy and boneless, the noise creeps in: the morning commute, the aluminum shutters along the strip, Thorgy’s theatrical singing downstairs. A hip-hop beat floats in from the beach.

Trixie turns to suggest breakfast but Katya’s zonked out again, looking like an ecstatic saint with his mouth gaping and his worry-lines smoothed away. Rather than wake him, Trixie slides on some sandals and ventures outside to pick up a couple bagels from the walk-up diner a few stores down. He decides to splurge, orders Katya an extra cup of cream cheese, a shot of espresso in his iced coffee.

There’s not much money left between them, especially after Trixie stopped showing up at Suburban. They junked Brenda for a few grand but spent the lion’s share of the money restocking their kitten caboodle with ammo, ‘nades, scopes, and some industrial-level setting spray.

But if Ginger’s word is anything to go by, and it usually is, they’ll be pissing pennies soon enough.

So, out of wheels and out of cash, they don’t wander far from home. They spend their afternoon pleasantly baked, arm-in-arm, at the Pleasure Pier, spinning around in tea-cups and popping a few quarters for the tower viewer to watch sexy surfer guys wipe out in the swells. At the BB gun stand, Trixie easily (and quickly) shoots a ring around the paper star until it disintegrates, winning Katya a huge pink octopus that he immediately greets into his arms with a grizzled, “Ooh. _Octopussy._ ”

“Thought you people didn’t like guns,” the carnie remarks, inspecting the dinky little shooter with a suspicious lift of his eyebrow.

“Oh,” Trixie says, straight-faced, “Section four, item three of the Gay Agenda. The revised edition.”

Katya jumps in, hissing through his teeth,  “We bleeding hearts gotta know how to make _hearts bleed._ ”

And then, with the same glee as a bride tossing her bouquet, Katya punts the stuffed octopus into a group of children. Trixie screams with laughter as they scatter.

#

Three hours before Ginger’s set to arrive, they waltz on home; and in record time, they’re primped and primed, plucked and painted—cinched, taped, and baked.

Katya couldn’t be happier, sitting cross-legged on the floor and inspecting her reflection in a chintzy hand mirror: Welcome back you demon bitch from hell. With a flick of the wrist, and an answering _thwoorp_ of a fan, Katya sighs happily. She tosses her chin, bakes her face, basks in the fading sunlight streaming through the window. It feels so goddamn, _motherfucking_ good to be back in drag. Snatched waist, heavy glue, and three inches of powder included. It’s feels like restoring a phantom limb, scratching that one elusive itch.

She’s missed the power of wearing a mask, having a face hidden from God and a body begging to sin. Pouting her big red lips, Katya flattens her bangs with a gloved hand and shakes her head, the white-blonde waves dancing against her cheeks and chin. (If she gets locked up again, she’s definitely gettin’ love letters, bitch.)

“You look really pretty,” Trixie mentions behind her; and in gratitude, Katya tosses a coquettish grin over her shoulder.

Trixie sways in front of the floor-length mirror, tugging at the satin ribbons of the pink bow flopping over her long, blonde hair like bunny ears. Time hasn’t dulled Trixie’s skill at all: Her mug is sharp as ever with those carved cheeks and mothy eyes, blushing and bashful in a demented little nightgown. She’s still the cutest killer clown that Katya’s ever seen.

Trixie faces her with a small curtsy.

“You look great,” Katya declares, “Like a taze to the face.”

“Oh,” Trixie says, flashing a thumbs-up, “Perfect.”

Opening her legs wide, Katya stretches out, wiggling her stockinged toes. Her makeup pile sits in the vee of her fishnets  like a dirty hoard of treasure: chintzy compacts wrapped in rubber bands, broken brushes, stained tubes of mascara and lipstick, all kinds of cosmetics that she’s either never touched or used to the very bitter end. All precious in their own way.

“I forgot how genuinely upsetting it is to watch you do your face,” Trixie comments, a smile in her voice, “It is... _so_ chaotic.”

Katya acts offended. She’s always done her makeup this way: on the floor, legs akimbo, hunched over a mirror. She’s a sucker for a good ritual.  

“I’ll have you know. There’s a method to my madness.”

“Sure it’s not the other way around?” Trixie cracks, folding up her tri-fold case sitting on the kitchen table.

She looks composed, cool-headed, even under all that deranged Cabbage Patch paint. And Katya’s so relieved to see it. More often than not, Katya’s crackpot schemes begin with Trixie calming her at the gate. She banks on it, actually. It’s nothing new. She’s always nervous before a job; and she’s sad to report that neither the blunt nor the blowie this morning managed to alleviate any of that old, bone-deep anxiety.

Cutting her dog-eared deck of tarot cards, Katya shuffles them absently between her legs. She doesn’t put much stock in esoterica shipped from an Amazon warehouse but...fate’s always been kinda funny to her and it would be nice to believe in something other than her woman’s intuition. Something that reassures her that at the end of her sad, crooked, colorful path (littered with crushed cigarettes, spent casings, and cheap rubbers), she’ll find what she wants. She’ll end up in a place where Trixie can play the guitar and worry the pitch and Katya can just...listen to it.

She picks three cards, flipping them over sideways.

One. Two. Three.

“Show me the money. “

Knight of Wands. Seven of Swords. The Tower.

Well, fuck you, too.

There’s a sharp knock at the door.

Instinctively, Katya tenses up, locking eyes with Trixie, who’s frozen in place. They’re expecting Ginger but...it could be Thorgy nosing around for the rent they still haven't paid. Or it could be someone else entirely. Because the thing is: They don’t get _visitors_. That’s the caveat of hiding in plain sight. Katya reaches for the prized 9mm at her feet, newly polished, locked and loaded—a filthy pig-killer that she’s named _Maureen_.  

Another knock, more insistent this time.

“Sweet baby Jesus, this better be the right place,” someone complains beyond the door, “It’s _me,_  gals! Finish scissorin’ and open up for God’s sake!”

Ginger.

Instantly, the both relax and Trixie barks with laughter as Katya leaps to her feet, bounding to the door. She no sooner unlatches the chain before Ginger barrels through, his chewed-up flip-flops smacking the floor. A plastic bag slung over his forearm, Ginger tosses them each an energy drink. Katya barely catches hers, fingers slipping on the condensation as she kicks the door shut.

Katya tries not to stare, but it’s completely hopeless. Ginger looks strikingly different from the last they saw of each other and seeing him so pasty, frizzy, and worn-down is like a punch to Katya’s gut. She hasn’t seen Ginger wear glasses since...God, probably prison, when they were on library detail together. The only thing Katya recognizes is the knee-brace that he’s needed since his brutal beating from Chachki.

(Curling her hand, Katya knows that her own souvenir has healed quite well in comparison. Just like she knew it would.)

“Hey, Ging,” Trixie says offhand, packing up the rest of her station.

“Quit staring, Diarrhea,” Ginger says, ignoring Trixie entirely, “I’m sure that under that slapdash paint-job, you look like ten miles of bad road yourself.”

Katya smiles at the old nickname but doesn’t retaliate.

Trixie does it for her.

“Is that any way to talk to your paycheck?”

“It is ‘till I’ve cashed it,” Ginger chuckles, glancing at Trixie as if he’s just noticed her imposing pink figure, “Good to see you’re still suitably terrifying.”

Ginger waddles around their shitty studio, hands-on-hips, planting his feet in front of the fritzy television as two VHS Vegas starlets fling champagne like holy water, toasting each other with their chips. There’s an awkward silence.

Trixie nods toward Ginger’s back and Katya panics a little, unsure what to say. Between the two of them, Katya’s always taken responsibility for “managing” Ginger. It makes perfect sense. They have history together, a long one. Bunking together. Working together. Fleeing across the country together. They even lived together during their first few months in LS.

Katya’s first instinct is to apologize for how they left off, which was...not at all…since they left Ginger out to dry.

“So,” Katya begins, “What’ve you been up to since—”

Ginger turns heel.

“Since you two disappeared off the face of the earth and left little ol’ me to the mercy of Vinewood’s vicious little gay mafia? Lovely! Time of my life, Mary!”

Katya slumps. “Ging….”

Ginger waves a hand, cutting her off.

“Forget it. Forget I said it, “ Ginger says, pausing for a moment before launching into a whole new tirade, “No, wait. Strike that. You wanna know what I’ve been up to? I’ve been runnin’ all over hell’s half acre, that’s what I’ve been up to. Scrounging for rent money on the dark web, surviving off Cheetos and Mountain Dew, while I phish for credit cards numbers and launder Monetcoin for house DJs in Ibiza.”

Naturally, Katya’s horrified. “Christ….”

“We all do what we’re good at. It’s a cryin’ shame nobody wants to watch you two clowns diddle each other all day long.”

Trixie sighs, rolling her eyes. “Hi, can we not do this? I did not sign up for this.”

“You’re not signed up for anything, sweetheart. None of us are until Alaska gives the go ahead. I’m workin’ commission on you two. So, I hope you two know how to make a decent first impression and sell this dog n’ pony show.”

Oh, and that’s another fucking thing fraying Katya’s nerves: They’ve never met directly with contract issuers. Ever. They’ve always relied solely on reputation. On novelty.With Ginger acting as the liaison, shadowed behind burner phones and hefty firewalls, brokering the deals and laundering the crypto. It was all about compartmentalization, a security measure to ensure some immunity from reprisals but....yeah, guess that didn’t really work out anyway….

“I’ve got a future riding on this,” Ginger says.

“Yeah. So do we,” Trixie replies sternly, crossing her arms, “Does she know our rate?”

“She’s wants to negotiate.”

“What’s _that_ mean?”

“It means you won’t walk away with less than you deserve, Tallulah. We’ve got a mutual self-interest. I’m not about to sell any of us short.”

“Then let’s get this over with,” Trixie says, “We’ve got plans.”

That’s news.

Trixie glances at Katya.

Oh.

That’s...a line of bullshit. Right.

Crushing her emptied can of Red Bull, Katya reaches for her pack of cigarettes, lighting up with a heavy pull, igniting the end of another for Ginger. He takes it without a thought.

“Yes. Let’s,” Ginger agrees, shuffling toward the door,  “And light a scented candle once in a while, would’ya? Stinks to high heaven in here. Emphasis on the _high._ ”

By the time they step out onto the landing, the sun’s sunken in deep and the city’s lit-up for  nightlife. For the first time in months, Trixie locks the door behind them. Ginger flicks the cigarette off the railing, carefully descending the rickety stairs.

A utilitarian blue van sits where they once parked Brenda, _Immaculate Heart of St. Bendelacreme_ stenciled along its body. Katya beams, prancing toward the van.

“Did you boost this from a church _?_   You warped little heathen.” She laughs, twirling around to punch Ginger’s shoulder.

“Boosting? With this knee? Those days are over, cupcake, you know that. I can barely walk, let alone run the streets,” Ginger says, jingling the keys, “I teach Sunday School.”

Trixie laughs loudly and Ginger answers with a withering stare.

Yanking open the sliding door, Katya grabs Trixie’s hand and ducks inside, dragging her to the very back seat, where the upholstery is vandalized with scribbled swear words and squirting dicks. The door slams shut behind them.

Trixie pinches Katya’s thigh. “Ginger’s really snapped, huh.”

Katya squeezes Trixie’s hand.

“Ginger’s got every right to be salty.”

Ginger could stick her with a hot poker _un-pro-voked_ and Katya would say, “That’s fair.” Ginger could use her corpse as a conversation piece, draped over the television like a safari poaching, and she’d say, “Completely warranted.”  As Katya watches Ginger’s head bob round the hood of the car, she doesn’t realize her leg is shaking until Trixie sets a hand on her knee, stilling it as Ginger hops into the driver seat and turns the engine over.

“I see you back there,” Ginger quips, peering at them through the rear-view mirror, “Remember to leave room for Jesus, kids, and behave when you meet Alaska. With any luck, you two will be out of my hair by the weekend.”

“Long gone,” Trixie pipes up, glancing at Katya from the corner of her eye, “Somewhere in paradise.”

Ginger stomps on the gas, propelling them back against the seat as the van screeches out of the lot, rocking on its wheels.

“Oh, I hope so,” Ginger simpers over the roar of the engine, “From your lips to God’s ears, Tina Marie.”


	10. Balaclava

Katya’s accustomed to dealing with petty gangs holed up in ramshackle clubhouses off the shoulder of the highway, in faceless ghost-town bars, rundown tenements, and forbidding row-homes. She’s used to gangbangers lurking around every corner, milling around every entrance like modern-day, pill-crushin’ sphinxes:  _Riddle me this, riddle me that, shut the fuck up and talk to my gat._  But Alaska’s place, The Snake Pit, is a bona-fide, full-fledged _discotheque_ in the Rockford Hills nightlife strip. Not at all what Katya expected. Especially for some off-shot, separatist operation of The Squirrelfriends, who only dealt in small-time firearms and experimental party drugs. This is meteoric movemaking. She’s impressed. Really impressed.

Katya stares past Trixie at the nightclub, the marquee lights reflecting pink and green in the bleached fall of her hair. She gawks at the queue stretching down the street. It’s the sexiest wait-list that Katya’s ever seen: All of them, spoiled and slim and shimmering, huffing and puffing while they play on their fashionable phones, accruing social capital.

“Gone awful quiet back there,” Ginger observes from the driver-seat.

Trixie glances up at the mirror, catching Ginger’s eyes. “I didn’t expect Alaska to be so enterprising.”

Last time Katya saw a front this audacious….

“Reminds you of Chachki, doesn’t it?” Ginger says to Katya, “For better or worse. Alaska’s just as driven. No lack of ambition either. They say she’s gonna be the next RuPaul Charles, if you can believe that.”

Trixie barks with laughter.  “What, locked up in Bolingbroke for tax evasion?”

“Surprised you two heard about that.”

“We’ve been off the radar, not under a rock. Look, half of Los Santos thinks they’re gonna be _The Next Big Thing,”_ Trixie says, “That’s kinda the whole point.”

“No need to get bratty with me, Miss Thing,” Ginger snaps back, “With Ru out of commission, there’s a seat that needs to be filled. I’m just tellin’ you what they say. Believe it or don’t. Makes no goddamn difference to me.”

Laying on the horn, Ginger high-beams a gaggle of club-goers loitering around the mouth of the alley. The van rumbles slow through the thin dark road, lurching to a stop.

It feels like they always end up in these shady backstreets, in places you have to _touch_ in order to really see. That’s most cities in a nutshell. From a distance, Los Santos looks like an absolute cherry—but run a hand along the gloss and you’ll feel the imperfections in the luster: the claw-marks of broken artists, the wear and tear of the American Dream, the vice that comes home to roost. That’s the world they’re living in—big and bad and beautiful.

When the door slides open, Trixie hops down first; and instinctively, Katya steadies herself with Trixie’s hand, following her out.  Ginger’s eyes widen.

“Cut that shit out,” Ginger fusses, swatting at their hands, “Christ on a stick, you’d think you two were new at this.”

Trixie rolls her eyes beneath those thick stacked lashes and releases Katya’s hand. “We got it, Ging,” she sighs, flinging her hands open in agitation.

From the beginning, Ginger’s always disapproved of them being a _Them_. A couple. An item. A package deal. And Ginger’s always had a solid point: Don’t shit where you eat!  It’s the oldest warning in the book. Love is messy. It’s a liability. It’s bad for business, especially in their line of work; because the more people who know, the more dangerous the work becomes.

But _herein lies the rub_ : Katya ran into Trixie in two different cities on two different coasts. Same place, same time. Across the entire fucking USofA! If they didn’t fuck, it’d be the spiritual equivalent of hockin’ a big, fat loogie right into Fate’s eye. Katya tried explaining this to Ging but he never wanted to hear it. “‘I’m happy,” Katya remembers confessing to Ginger, holding his hands, “I think I’m in love.” And Ginger’s expression oscillated from pity to disbelief; he seemed to think it was all a crock of shit—that Katya would wake up one day and realize that Good Ol’ Minj-Ging knew better.

“Mark my words. One of you is gonna end up dead. And it’ll be through no fault but your own.”

Luckily, that day still hasn’t come.

Ginger narrows his eyes at them—but seems satisfied enough to turn his back, gesturing for them to follow. The Snakes have the sidedoor blockaded with heaps of pink trash bags that look like globs of melted penny candy. The pavement, glowing iridescent with slicks of oil and rain, vibrates with the deep baseline thrumming from inside the club.  Hands on hips, Ginger stares at the steel door. Then, he turns heel to face them.

“Look,” Ginger says, softening a little, “I’m trying to impress these people.”

He pauses.

“That’s a fuckin’ lie,” he amends, “I’m trying to squeeze as much juice outta these gangsters as possible and then cozy up to some easy-peasy, clerical con-jobs. The more you appeal to Alaska’s mean streak, the better. I can’t have you two love-bugs close as cat’s breath, alright? Keep it to a minimal. Keep it….”

“Ambiguous,” Katya finishes with relish, sliding her tongue along her teeth.

Ginger chuckles. “Now, where’d you learn a word like _ambiguous_?”

“I seriously went t—”

“To community college, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Ginger says, waving a hand, and Trixie cackles, cutting through some of the tension that’s snared them all like a cat’s cradle, “C’mon, you two idiots. Let’s not leave the Queen waiting.”

Kicking aside some of the trash, Ginger approaches the door speckled with peeling holographic stickers and flyers worn white under the California sun. He knocks and each forceful pound of his fist is like a shockwave, resuscitating all the nervous butterflies sleeping in the pit of Katya’s stomach. The excitement makes her knees a little weak, her breath a little short.

“Showtime,” Trixie murmurs into Katya’s temple, so close that Katya can smell the powder pounded into her skin and the slight tang of sweat beneath the atomized flowercandy of her perfume, and it grounds her just enough to focus and calm herself down.

A peephole  slides open and an intense pair of eyes stare out behind a metal grate. Ginger says nothing, rocking in his flip-flops, hands stuffed in his Bermudas. After a beat, the doorman rolls their eyes and sighs.

“Passphrase,” he intones, like it’s the most idiotic thing in the world. Because it is. A third grade song n’ dance: _Circle, circle, dot, dot, you just got a cootie shot_. Katya loves it.

Ginger scratches the tip of his ear, the skin burnt and flaking. “C’mon, Vander.”

“Pass. Phrase,” he repeats, “Please. This is my job.”

Ginger hesitates, long enough that Katya has to nudge his shoulder. (“C’mon, Ging.”) He scowls. “Alright! Alright.”

“ _Anusthingispossible_ ,” Ginger slurs on a breath, “Now, open up.”

Trixie claws into Katya’s forearm and they fall against each other, snickering.

“This is…Them?” Vander asks, clearly unimpressed.

Trixie bristles beside her. Katya has to admit: The casual dismissal stings a little. Have they really been gone so long? Or does everyone have short memories? Really, it’s all the impetus Katya needs to fall back into character and inhabit the fully-leaded, devilish dyke whose legacy she’s abandoned. Trixie, too. She knows. If they’re of one mind on anything, it’s that strange thirst for recognition that comes and goes like a spring fever.

“Maybe, in another life, we’re on television,” she once mused aloud, splattered in blood, crouched on the floor of a motel room and sucking on a cigarette like her life depended on it.

“Who’d be crazy enough to put us on television,” Trixie huffed, toiling with the body as she rolled it into the duvet, “Me, maybe. You? Definitely not.”

At the time, Katya was perfectly willing to watch Trixie do all the work with the body. That particular hit got a little too close for Katya’s comfort. Everything went wrong. Her honey-pot went sour, Trixie missed her shot by a _fucking hair_ , and Katya had to...improvise...with a phone cord and a broken bottle of schnapps before she finally unclipped a stiletto from her garter, and plunged the blade into his neck. After a lethal twist of the wrist, the mark stopped moving, pumping blood into the mattress until Trixie finally barged through the door and pulled Katya off of him. The whole ordeal shook Katya up a little. It reminded her a little too much of home.

After a lengthy disagreement about the word ‘forensics,’ and its application in both the field of linguistics and crime-scene investigation, Katya ended up assisting with the basic clean-up. She wiped prints, dusted the bedframe and the chintzy radio crackling with an old, jazzy tune. (Pink Floyd, if she remembers correctly. One of the slow ones.)

“Hey. You ever think about parallel universes?”

Trixie sighed, dropping the dead man's arm. “Is this a _Contact_ thing? Baby, we do not have time for this right now.”

“It’s not! No...well...it’s not, it’s not,” Katya argued, lighting up the corner of the mark’s wallet and tossing it into the trashcan, “It’s...You ever think there might be a universe where we haven’t met? It weird to think about it, right? It’s weird that it’s weird.”

Trixie didn’t answer for a minute. “...Are you _sure_ he didn’t slip you something?”

“Stop. I’m serious,” she laughed, her voice still a little shaky, “You’ve never thought about it?”

Trixie hooked her arm in hers, ushering them toward the door as the wastebasket ignited with a _whoosh_ , kindling old wrappers and crinkled receipts. “I think we’re lucky to have each other,” she said, “That’s what I think.”

Katya made a disgusted noise and Trixie barked with laughter, the heat of the fire at their backs as they skedaddled on out of there before any of the neighbors got curious about the noise. Or the broken glass. Or the smoke. They didn’t hear anything on the news until a few days later. The fire hadn’t quite done the trick.  In the heatwave, when the smell got too bad, the cops rolled out their wiseguy like a bloated, pre-embalmed Cleopatra.

Ginger gave them shit for that one. (Too slapdash. Too messy. Distracted. Greedy. All those things were true.)

“We’re bad girls who do bad things,” Katya tells Vander, while Trixie wraps her arms around her waist, pulling her in like a prom date.

“And if you pay us enough," Trixie finishes, "we won’t even cry.”

The Serpent Sentinel eyes them up and down. Then, he slides the metal slot closed, unlatching the door from inside. He stands in the frame, small, slim, and completely stone-faced.

“Welcome to the jungle,” Vander says, beckoning them inside a dark, cramped corridor.

Inside, the dull pounding of the music suddenly clarifies and the heavy, driving baseline is...familiar. Katya bites back a grin as Trixie stiffens beside her, groaning.

“I’m triggered,” she confirms, as 'Gimme More' blares through a maintenance door propped open with a folding chair. Through the gap, Katya peeks at the dark bodies moved by Molly beneath glittering fans of disco-tropical light. The go-go dancers wiggling in their cages. The skeined illusion of water dancing against the walls. Vander kicks out the chair and the door slams shut. Katya flinches.

“Follow me.”

A cramped hallway and a flight of stairs later, Vander escorts them out onto the crowded second-level mezzanine, where the heat and din of The Snake Pit really hits full-force. Katya looks out over the balcony, through the dripping vines latticed over the dance floor. It’s been a while since Katya felt the energy of a place like this, a cauldron of humanity with all the bubble, bubble, toil and trouble that boils up inside of it. If Katya had to assign a description for the place, she’d say: Spring Break at The Hanging Gardens, Babylonia Gone Wild. It’s deliriously tacky. Katya wants to explore every square inch of the place.

Vander leads them through the bar crowded with rowdy party-goers. The lighting is so scattershot that Katya thinks she recognizes Sapphire doing body shots on the bartop, dragging her studded tongue along a salt line on a six-pack. So scattershot that Trixie looks halfway passable from one blink to the next.

Vander veers off, leading them toward a girl in a skimpy ocelot number, her two-toned hair chopped around her shoulders, stars tattooed beneath her eyes. She’s devastating, but slightly awkward looking, as she lounges against a door camouflaged into the wall. Nodding at Vander, she allows them to pass through.

Katya blinks a few times, adjusting to the warm incandescent lighting of the empty lounge. The door seals shut and it’s suddenly so quiet that Katya figures the place has gotta be soundproofed. She recognizes the blunt acoustics, the abbreviated babble-buzz of the extravagant reptile terrariums lining the walls of Alaska’s suite. Ignoring all the bizarre glassware and lurid artwork, Katya and Trixie both gravitate toward the tiny rainforest built into the walls. Pressing her nose against the glass, Katya peers through layers of twisted orchids, balsa ferns, and fat banana leaves, hoping to catch a glimpse of something dangerous. Trixie looks with her, standing taller, and Katya feels their fingers hook before she remembers they shouldn’t touch that way. Still, she doesn’t pull away.

“Do you see anything,” Trixie whispers, tapping her nail against the glass.

Katya pouts, straightening up. “No.”

“I told you,” Ginger complains behind them, his laugh nervous, “Raised by wolves.”

“I think it’s cute,” a woman demurs, her nasal voice clinging to the vowels, her consonants slow to strike.   

Snapping to attention, Katya turns to a slender woman seated in an armchair, a yellow boa constrictor draped along her bony shoulders. With two blonde buns nesting in her head, she  clicks her long red nails, smooching the snake’s forked tongue as it quivers in her direction.

“Woah,” Trixie utters.

“Got that right.”

She’s wearing black latex ( _sitting_ in black latex) and if there’s anything that Katya’s learned from Chachki: One who wears latex casually is not one to be trifled with. Her gravitational pull is so intense that Katya almost feels like she should bow.

Weirdly enough, she actually recognizes the Queen of the Snakes. They raced back in the day, when Katya and Ginger were first finding their feet in the City of Saints by slinging dope, shaving points, and racing Southside. There’s only one race that sticks out in Katya’s mind—for two reasons. One, it was the night she and Trixie reunited. Two, it was the most humbling race of her career. Alaska completely smoked her. Smoked _everyone_. Everyone else in that race was playing for second place; and who gives a shit about silver in a motherfucking drag race?

Nobody.

(Make no mistake: Katya still earned it, though. She did that.)

Making kissy-faces at her snake, Alaska gestures toward a pair of sectional sofas, inviting them to sit. Ginger steps forward but Alaska raises her palm, stopping him in his tracks.

“Not you, girl. Wait outside.”

Katya expects Ginger to protest. She can see the discontent rippling across Ginger’s shoulders; but, he merely nods and then backs away, shooting Katya a warning glare on his way out.

“Please,” Alaska says again, sharper this time, and with an emphatic show of her hand.

They obey, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on the couch across from Alaska, sinking into the dark buttery leather. It’s always leather with crime-lords. After all, it is the easiest to clean.

Alaska claps her hands, palm to palm, taking care that her nails don’t clash—all while a pale yellow boa slithers across her jutting collarbones.

“Help yourself,” she says, gesturing to a bowl of orange mints sitting on the cocktail table, “but don’t spoil your dinner, now.”  

“Trixie and Katya,” Alaska says, looking at them like they’re a couple of pinned butterflies. Her voice is like a simmer, a playful splash against a hot pewter pan.

Snapping one leg over the other, Katya fishes for a Tic-Tac and then chomps down. “In the _flesh_.”

“Live and...in...technicolor,” Trixie says, trailing off as she watches the snake slowly coil around Alaska’s bare shoulders.

Alaska laughs. The veins in the back of her hand stand out as she strokes the albino scales of her pet. “Does Lil’ Poundcake make you nervous?”

“Uh. Yeah,” Trixie answers bluntly, “It’s a six foot nightmare worm from Central America.”

Katya can’t hold back a grin: Sounds like her ex-boyfriend.

Alaska’s inflated upper lip curls into a smile. She grabs the serpent by the head, gives it a loving shake, and then rises from her chair. Squeaking, she meanders toward the vivariums. She moves the way a hunter moves while looking for dead things. She moves just like she talks: slowly and with purpose. It tells Katya everything she needs to know about the woman said to be the Second Coming of Ru: In a world where time is money, Alaska clearly enjoys an abundance of the two.

Katya’s beginning to buy into the Alaska hype.

Over the years, she’s seen plenty of hungry upstarts try to cut themselves out of the game and end up saturating their ranks with opportunistic Yes-Men before power-tripping over their own feet. Ozymandias, bitch: _Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!_ She’s seen enough of them to know that Alaska is different. Galvanized. Ready for a throne. Even more prepared than Frankie...and that kid was vicious with a capital 'V.'

Alaska returns Lil’ Poundcake to her tank. “Thank you for coming. I know this kind of face-to-face meeting is unusual for you.”

“I prefer ass-to-face myself,” Katya replies, and it makes Alaska laugh.

After retrieving a folder from her cherrywood desk, the boss returns to her seat across from them. “I would go through Ginger, like the old days, but...you know it is. My people used to be Detox’s people. So, the less who know about this, the better. You know how bangers talk.”

“Oh, yeah _,_ ” Katya agrees, nodding her head, miming her hands, “Chatty Cathies.”

“Yeah. No kidding,” Trixie interjects, grabbing the reins and cutting right to the chase, “So, you want us to take out Detox, right? That’s where this is going.”

She sounds impatient. Bossy. With a rush of pride, Katya props her elbow on her knee and her chin atop her fist, watching Trixie project strength like she’s gone toe-to-toe with Big Bads all her life. It’s pretty sexy. And Katya would bank her life on Trixie being right. Taking out Detox is the smartest gambit. Alaska’s gotta squash that rivalry real quick, recruit any leftover defectors, take the territory and plant her flag. Gang wars are expensive, and exhaustive, and scary...they’re fucking scary. Katya knows first-hand.

Alaska nods, shifting her attention. “Ginger told me you wouldn’t need much convincing. I hear you have history.”

“A little.” Trixie shrugs, downplaying it.

Honestly, at this point, Katya would take a shot at Detox for a lollipop and a pat on the ass. Katya doesn’t like to dwell, even though she does; and she doesn’t like holding grudges, even though she cradles them close to her heart like a baby born bad. Oh, it’s a fucking curse, a misaligned moon. If she sees Revenge on the menu, she’s bound to order it. Vengeance is a versatile dish. A personal favorite. Hot or cold, rare or raw, wriggling on the goddamn spit...Doesn’t matter how you serve Revenge, just as long as you serve it, and Katya owes Detox for all those sleepless nights.

And for Chinatown, especially.

Katya fidgets in her seat, suppressing a feverish swell of energy that makes her wanna move. Makes her wanna fight. Or fuck. Or whatever. And she feels her smile fade away.

“Detox’s birthday is this week,” Alaska explains, “There’s gonna be a party that they’ve paid the cops to ignore. You know them, you won’t miss it. It’ll last for _days_. That’s your window.”

She slaps a few pictures down on the glass table dividing them. Both Trixie and Katya lean forward, inspecting the glossy renderings of a gorgeous, diamond-white hypercar: an Överflöd Roxxxy XF.

“After you take care of Detox _,_ you’re going to grab the Roxxxy, shake the heat, and take it to a landing strip in the Grand Senora.” Extending her hand, Alaska offers them a folded index card and Trixie takes it, opening it in front of Katya, revealing a string of numbers. Coordinates.

Frowning, Trixie folds it up again. “And where are we to find this incredibly luxurious, incredibly conspicuous car?”

“Wherever Detox goes, the Roxxxy follows, girl.  It’ll be at the festivities. Trust me,” Alaska responds cooly, “I’ll have an associate waiting for you at the strip. When you hand over the car, she’ll hand over your payment, and our business will be...concluded. Indefinitely”

Trixie nods. “And our payment is _what_ , exactly?”

“Five-hundred grand,” Alaska says, as if it’s only a minor dent in her wallet. Katya’s mouth waters. “Each.”

Each.

 _Each_.

To the tune one _million_ fucking dollars, Katya’s stomach drops right into her throbbing pussy. She tries not to grab onto Trixie, or get too excited, keep a poker face like her partner in crime—who’s also struggling to keep her cool. Trixie’s whole body is tight, her throat gulping as they lock eyes. Katya bites down on her own tongue to keep from saying anything. Trixie clears her throat.

“Um. Can you,” Trixie pipes up, her voice cracking, “Can you, uh...give me a second to talk to my pa...my, uh...My Katya?”

“Of course,” Alaska agrees, rising from her seat. Katya smiles at the fluorescent green, dollar store claw clip fastened into the back of her head, watching her until she disappears from the lounge and retreats further into her suite. A door clicks behind her and it’s like the air lifts, an instant relief.

“So. She’s terrifying,” Trixie proclaims.  

“Holy fucking shit,” Katya breathes, “You heard that number, right?”

“Know your worth, demand three times that,” Trixie recites, as if in a daze, “God. What the hell did Ginger say was our going _rate_?”

“Ugh, I don’t know but I wanna french that toad until it turns him into a motherfucking prince,” Katya hisses, grabbing onto Trixie’s thigh, shaking her,  “A million dollars! For _one_ job. Trixie…..”

“I know. _Oh my God,_ I know _._ Like, I’ve got…,” she lowers her voice to a whisper, leaning in close, “I’ve got an actual chubby right now.”

Wiggling her hand beneath Trixie’s nightgown, Katya grins in shock when she squeezes the semi smothered beneath layers of frilly bloomers. “Oh, mama. That anaconda ain’t no joke."

“Lil’ Poundcake, eat your heart out,” Trixie breathes, reluctantly pulling Katya’s hand away. Caging their fingers, Trixie chuckles into Katya’s knuckles. “Your eyes look _crazy_ right now.”

Katya squirms closer, holding their conjoined hands beneath her chin. “We’re doing this, right,” she pleads into Trixie’s neck, “We’re doing it.”

“Oh, we’re doing it,” Trixie affirms, as if Katya were asking in the first place, “We’re definitely doing it.”

They’ve never had a payout even remotely close to a million dollars. (At the highest, three-hundred grand.) Sure, a million ain’t what it used to be but a million dollars still ain’t nothing to sniff at. The money won’t last forever; but, if they’re smart, they can stretch that cash a long way. It can carry them long enough. Far enough.

The atmosphere suddenly shifts. Like something magnetic. A heavy, electric presence that makes Katya’s hair stand on end. Do ghosts feel like this? She breaks away from Trixie just as Alaska drifts back into the lounge, sits back down and looks between them. Her lips purse and she steeples her fingers.

“Can I ask you two a question,” she asks, childish glee sparking in her big, black eyes.

Leaning forward, Katya nods, still thunderstruck by greed. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Trixie’s faring much the same.

“You two mirror each other’s body language,” Alaska points out, positively tickled, her talon swaying like a metronome, “Have you ever noticed that?”

With a jolt, Katya realizes that Alaska’s actually right: She and Trixie are angled in toward one another, legs-crossed, an elbow perched on each of their knees. Like a mirror image. Shocked, they break apart, limbs flailing into less obvious positions.

Katya would laugh if Alaska weren’t already doing it for them. Unsettled, Katya can’t tell whether Alaska sees through their facade or whether she just knows which buttons to press. Which triggers to pull to set them off balance. She seems to enjoy it. And sure, it’s been a while since Katya courted a kingpin, but she can’t shake the impression that Alaska’s kindness is calculated, her hospitality a smokescreen for something much darker. She’s not telling them something....which means the risk of this job is much greater than she implies.

“So,” the thin woman says, all business as she straightens in her seat, swatting a hank of blonde hair behind her shoulder, “do we have a deal?”

Oh, do we.

“Make it 1.5 and you can betcha mama’s big fat ass we do,” Katya blurts on a whim.

Caught off-guard, Trixie whips her neck to look at her. Then, she regains her composure, addressing Alaska again.

“Half up front,” Trixie dares, rolling with the punches, just as Katya knew she would.

Alaska seems completely unfazed by the higher number. Did Katya low-ball it?

Could she have bargained for more? Jesus fucking Christ….

After a moment of consideration, gnawing on her lower lip, Alaska finally nods her ascent. “You’re a cheap date,” she teases, sibilant and slow, dancing her long fingers across a tablet, “We have a deal then. Let’s hope for a happy ending, hmm?”

#

On the ride home, nestled in the back-seat of Ginger’s van, Katya holds an armored attache against the top of her thighs, her hands wrapped around the edges in a gargoyle-grip. She’s a little shell-shocked at the small fortune sitting in her lap as she and Trixie rock back and forth with each sharp turn and bump in the road. Every so often, Katya flips the snaps so that they can both peek inside at the seven-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars sitting on Katya’s crotch. The hefty bricks of cash are neatly arranged, pressed and clean. The two of them stare into that case like they’ve just pried open the Ark of the Covenant, their faces melting at the inhuman beauty of it.

Trixie lifts her head. “I’ll tell you what, Ginger, if I weren’t already spoken for….”

Closing the case, Katya glances up at the rearview mirror. “Ever been in a threesome, Minj?”

Ginger makes a disgusted face. “The only threesome I care about is the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, thank you very much.”

Trixie chuckles. “ _Kinky_.”

Flustered, Ginger huffs a little, stomping on the brake as he catches a red light. Katya’s hand flies out, bracing herself on the row of seats in front of them.  “Pipe down,” Ginger scolds, “Let me remind you. I’m the only one with a working seatbelt in here.”

To drown out their laughter, Ginger twists the volume knob until the indulgent saxophones of ‘Smooth Operator’ fill the church van. This makes them laugh more. Relaxing against the seat, Katya rests her head against the back, glancing over at her partner.

Shrouded in darkness, Trixie stares at her, eyes darting to Katya's lips before she kisses her suddenly, stealing one under Ginger’s watch. But Katya doesn’t settle for a quick peck. She never does. It’s their theme, like a musical reprise: a tease and a chase. _Allegretto moderato, Mister  Roboto. Gimme, gimme more._

“I wanna jerk you off so much right now,” Katya confesses, sucking on Trixie’s lower lip, “I just... wanna...jerk….”

“Not with those nails,” Trixie laughs, “I know that cash has got you all _riled-up_ but save some for later, you perv.”

Pulling back, Katya shudders, thrilling at the smudge of red lipstick across Trixie’s mouth, like a signature. If Katya had her way, she’d drag her blood-red mark all over Trixie’s soft ear, her rough neck, the birthmark that she _swears_  isn’t a third nipple—even though the idea turns Katya on like a motherfucker. If Katya had her way, Trixie would be her chew-toy, all day, every day—and Katya would make damn sure she loved every second of it. With soft eyes, Katya stares at her, knowing she should be nice and swipe at the red mark with her thumb, clean her up a spell; but Trixie stops her, pressing her lips together, massaging the colors together.

“Those orange Tic-Tacs did nothing to improve your breath, by the way.”

Katya swats at her, even though she’s right about that one. “Don’t be mean.”

“I’m never mean,” Trixie insists. She smirks, lifting her chin. “Never to you.”

Katya smiles. She might be right about that one, too.


	11. Good Intentions, Bad Vibrations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be at the end of the last update but ????? Life ran away with me, folks. Virgo season is something else.

“Home sweet home,” Ginger grouses from the front seat, pulling into the backlot of Smoke on the Water and through an open space beside Thorgy’s motor-scooter. The _thwack_ of Ginger’s door handle startles Katya from her rest on Trixie’s shoulder and the interior lights blink on. With the engine cut, and Trixie breathing softly, Katya can hear the foot-traffic of the Vespucci strip, the indistinct rhythm of music on the beach.

She wiggles the attache still sitting on her lap, clawing her black nails against the ridges of the hard case until her veins pop along her hand. Beside her, Trixie watches. Her brown eyes are warm with hope, blown-out in excitement. Katya loves that look: It’s how she looks after a job well done, after they’ve been under the gun and on the run, harried and hungry.

The van door scrapes open and Ginger pops his head inside. With a tired groan, he motions for them. Trixie ducks out first then Katya, her jellies landing squarely on the blacktop. She takes in the air: salt and sand and warm, fried sugar, a suggestion of torched marijuana with spilt _gasolina_. Over at the pier, the LoopdeeLoop roars along its tracks. It’s gotta be on one of its last rides of the night.

Trixie extends a glittering hand and with a wry smirk, Ginger accepts the shake.

“I’m sure we’ll run into you again,” Trixie says, before her voice softens, “But if we don’t…Look us up? We’ll owe you one.”

“Take care, Walt.”

After a touch to Katya’s elbow, Trixie backs off, leaving her alone with Ging. Over her shoulder, Katya can hear the old wooden stairs creaking as Trixie heads up and inside the apartment. She hefts the weight of the case, resting it against the jut of her hip.

“We do owe you, Ging,” Katya echoes, feeling jittery all of a sudden, bouncing on her heels, “Thank you.”

“ _Pfft_. You called me, remember? And by accident, I might add,” he chuckles, “I’m just here for a paycheck. Riding your coattails is a lucrative way of life. Just ask your lesbian lover over there.”

With a playful roll of her eyes, Katya lifts a finger. “Watch it, pal.”

Ginger laughs, rummaging through his pockers for a pack of Winstons, offering to Katya. She slides out a cig, leaning over to bum Ginger’s light--and oh God, it’s such a relief, like straightening a curl or working out a knot. Katya smiles, filling her lungs, staring up at the night sky. She can’t see any stars. She can’t remember the last time she saw stars that weren’t from getting knocked up the side of the head. Maybe, hopefully, she’ll see some soon. The first exhale escapes from the corner of her lips.

Wherever they went, and wherever they’ve gone, Ginger and Katya have always found their own smoking corner. She remembers sneaking out the back of Hotlanta, always flushed and shaky and jonesing for a cigarette after a meeting with Chachki—especially if they concluded business by slurpin’ on a ding-a-ling, which…they occasionally did. Katya would find Ginger with his elbows bent over a loading rail, three cigarettes deep and blowing smoke, itching to bitch about about their pillow-bitin’-rankled-reptilian-ballbustin’-barbarian of a boss. It was fun.

“Hey,” Ginger says, smirking, “Do you remember Kennedy?”

“ _Kennedy,”_ Katya draws out the name as if it’s the title of an old movie, a treasured thing hidden beneath the weight of hard years, “How could I forget Kennedy?”

Miss Kennedy used to deliver shipments to Frankie’s studio. She’d hop out of the truck in her creased, denim jumpsuit and yuk it up with Ginger and Katya while the grunts unloaded Chachki’s order: furniture, racks of clothing, crates of film equipment, all legitimate business—usually. Katya remembers Kennedy’s energetic laugh and her big eyes, how she insisted on calling Katya ‘Alcatraz.’ Katya remembers she had a daughter, Chi Chi, who loved to dance.

“What made you think of Kennedy?”

“Now that I’ve got some capital, I’m thinking about going back East for a spell,” Ginger says, smacking on his cigarette.

“Huh,” Katya grunts.

Ginger shrugs. “It’s home, Mary.”

“Yeah. Well, yeah. It…it is… _that._ ”

And Katya would rather deep-fry her own dick than go back there. She’ll be happy if all she ever sees of Liberty City is on the silver screen, surviving one stubborn disaster after another: aliens, tsunamis, Wall Street, you name it….

Just thinking about back East, Katya can feel the coarse grain of the Tuckahoe concrete, the way the sun would glint off the barbed wire. She can see the gray clouds gathering over Slumlord Rico’s tenement buildings in Easton and the orange streetlights that used to pop on at dusk over her old stomping grounds, where she used to run wild with all the local hellraisers. She started young. Before her balls dropped, she’d be out with the _droogs_ shoplifting chocolate and cigarettes from corner-bodegas, smashing bottles in the street, shouting every vile word she could. She can taste blood in her mouth, feel her baby teeth shifting.

(One time, this older boy, a red-headed punk named Roman, thought it would be funny to tie a firecracker to the end of a tabby-cat’s tail. It wasn’t funny. But all the boys laughed. And Katya laughed with them, while the poor thing jumped and shrieked and showered sparklers over the street.

“Flaming pussies, “ Roman sneered, pushing at Katya’s shoulder blades, “…guess that means Mitya’s next!” Katya shoved him. He shoved back. And after a well-timed kick to Roman’s crotch, the whole group erupted in a scuffle. They were mindless winged monkeys, boys pushing boys, arms and legs flailing in poor imitation of their fathers and uncles and brothers, all the sinister shadows lurking along the walls at parties and wakes that they were doomed to become.

Little Mitya, usually so shy and frail, staggered back home with two black eyes, a split lip, and the tender realization that this was to be his life and he would have to learn to enjoy it. Holding up his Aunt’s hand-mirror, he didn’t see Dmitri, battered and bruised. He saw his green eyes staring out of those dark rings, looking pretty and stark and bright. He tossed a look over his shoulder and bit into his lower lip until it bloomed with a deep, dangerous red. If this was to be his life, he decided, he would have to learn to revel in it. Teach himself to enjoy it. Find some beauty in it. And he tried. He really did try.)

Katya doesn’t want to talk about _Back Home_.

Standing together in the pale blue night, Ginger and Katya lapse into silence. It’s awkward. Made even more so by how they used to talk. What did they ever talk about? Katya can’t remember. She can’t remember the last time she spoke to Ginger about anything other than money. Things were a lot simpler between them in prison. The confinement had a way of forcing simplicity, filing every human interaction down to its barest essentials. In prison, it suited them to be friends; so, they just _were_.

Ginger needed protection; so, Katya vouched for him, even though Ginger was only in for small-time thievery, internet scams, blackmail. (He stole a lot of money from a lot of nursing homes with forged letters from deposed monarchs in Lithuania. And he ended up with a public defender to boot.) Katya cleared his papers with the thieves-in-law. Welcomed him into the fold. For two whole years, Ginger was the only person Katya really talked to, who saw behind her defensive Performance: the stiff shoulders, the stooped posture, the aggressive gait. Before Ginger, Katya only ever spoke in short, clipped sentences—smiling briefly and laughing even briefer. It was horrible. Fucking awful. Soul-crippling! If not for Ginger, Katya probably would have collapsed inward, like a dying star, a small black bead shivering in infinite dark until….

Ginger’s company meant a lot back then. Probably more than Katya can quantify. Probably more than Ginger knows.

Ginger avoids her eyes. He gazes across the way as the neighbor, screaming in Spanish, chases her boyfriend out of their apartment. Katya only catches the words “asshole,” “money,” and “Wednesday.” It’s gotta be the third time this month that Yara’s kicked her boyfriend’s ass to the curb. But he keeps coming back. And she keeps letting him. (He’s hot as fuckin’ hell though, so…there’s that.) He flips Yara the bird and slams the door on his Canis. With no headlights, he screeches out through the pylons, charging down the street, blowing the stop sign.

“He’s always hanging on the rail at The Vanilla Unicorn,” Katya says offhand, flicking her cigarette to the pavement.

“The Vanilla Unicorn,” Ginger mulls it over, “…Isn’t that the strip joint off the Strawberry blade? What the hell are you doing at The Vanilla Unicorn?”

“ _Why, chasin’ pussy, bud,_ ” Katya growls, breaking character to laugh, “ _Gettin’ some strange_.”

“Wilder things have happened,” Ginger points out, “I left you alone for one night in Los Santos and _three days later_ , you came home in full drag with a stray on your heels, tellin’ me you two knocked off a liquor store together.”

Katya smiles. Those three days were heaven on earth and another story for another time. However, to hear Ginger tell it, you’d think Trixie was some random boy that Katya plucked off the street one night and made into their business partner over a beer and some heavy petting….(which, alright, has some truth to it)...and he'd say that Katya’s been dickmatized ever since (and, honestly, there’s a kernel of truth to that, too...because Katya could devote her entire life to slobbin’ on that knob and not issue a single fucking complaint. In a way, without making any official pronouncement or whatever, Katya already has. Somewhere along the way, Trixie went from a fun thing to _everything_...and Katya doesn’t mind it, not as much as she once thought she would.)

“Trixie used to work over at the Unicorn a couple nights a week,” Katya explains, shrugging, “I liked talking to the girls. They liked talking to me.”

“You always did have a way with disenfranchised young women.”

 “Because I am one,” Katya declares proudly, before shrugging a little, “Well. Not so young. Very disenfranchised.”

Maybe she’s feeling inspired after visiting with the Queen of Snakes...but with her half of the paycheck, Katya could open up a debauched little cavern all her own. She can already hear the dressing room and that easy, effervescent way that women talk to each other, among each other. It’s a good sound, one that she’s never taken for granted.

Ginger ashes to the pavement, “Ever think about going back to that? Running girls?”

“No,” Katya scoffs immediately, instinctively. She’d rather sell her own ass, on her own terms, than hoodwink wide-eyed runaways again. “I can’t...I’d have to... _season somebody._  I don’t want to do that. I never wanted to do that.”

“You were good at it. When you had to be.”

“Find ‘em, feed ‘em, fuck ‘em,” Katya recites, with banal resentment for what Chachki used to call _The Finesse,_  “Believe me, it doesn’t require a special tal-ent." 

Ginger smirks, tilting his head toward the apartment, toward Trixie.  “Worked like a charm on that one.”

“That’s... _rotted,”_ Katya chokes out, her stomach twisting, “That’s... _You’re rotted_.”

Ginger cackles and Katya laughs, too—because it’s a joke—but fuck, is it an unpleasant comparison to make. And there’s no comparison between the two. None! None. But Ginger deserves to take a few whacks at her; so, Katya lets him have them.

Ginger smokes down his cigarette, his eyes narrowing. The sea-breeze rustles a few strands of hair across his forehead. His skin glows with sweat, reflecting the carnival lights blinking from the pier.

Katya’s arm aches a little bit and she remembers the small fortune dangling by her side.

(They say money won't heal all wounds...but, in Katya’s humble opinion, it still makes a helluva suture.)

Holding up the case, Katya taps the front invitingly. “Almost forgot your cut!”

To her shock, Ginger doesn’t perk up.

“Keep it,” he says, “You’re gonna need every last penny.”

“Wait. Wh-?”

“I got my own deal worked out with Alaska, remember?”

Katya steps forward, tucking the case under her arm.

“This is more than _half-a-mil_ , Ginger,” she reminds him, hissing through her teeth.

“I’m good.”

“And you call _me_  crazy.”

Ginger smiles. “Consider it a farewell gift.”

“So,” Katya says, slowly, “... this is the big goodbye, then?”

It’s the obvious foregone conclusion: That they would, once again, go their separate ways. Possibly for good. Likely for good. But still, she can’t help but feel stunned by the reality, the absolute _finality_  written across Ginger’s face.

“‘Fraid so, Diarrhea,” Ginger affirms and Katya feels it hitting her right in the stomach, getting real, and she’s always had a rather chaotic digestive system.

Katya fidgets in place, lowering the case again, bracing her arm to do something (anything) with her free hand. The roller coaster shrieks in the distance.

“For what it’s worth, Ging,” she says, rubbing her own bicep, as if she’s caught a chill, “I’m sorry.”

For showing up one day, a few months after Ginger’s release, pressuring him into ‘doing work’ for the Rascalovs. For wrapping him up in Chachki’s bullshit and then treating him like a third wheel. For abandoning him when things got too hairy. It’s a good list of sins. Katya doesn’t expect Ginger to forgive them.

“I…tried my best,” she says, and it’s the honest-to-God truth, the way she sees it. 

“We all gotta look out for ourselves,” Ginger says, sounding sympathetic, “...What’s done is done, Mitya.”

Katya looks Ginger in the eye. She nods, accepts it.

Ginger pats her arm. “Just...pull it off, alright? Do the job. Before you know it, you two will be God-Knows-Where, humpin’ on a bed of cash.”

“We tried that once,” Katya confesses, grimacing, “Never again, lemme tell you…he almost got a staph infection.”

“How do you _almost_  get a...Nevermind,I don’t want to know,” Ginger says, waving his hands, “He can’t say ‘no’ to you, y’know, that’s always been his problem.”

Katya rolls her tongue along the inside of her lip. Oh, _please._

“And you gas him up too much, he thinks he can’t possibly fail,” Ginger continues, pointing a finger, “That’s always been _yours._  Watch out for that.”

“Y’know. If you were planning on doling out life lessons and relationship advice, you should’ve just come inside and had some coffee.”

“I’m just callin’ it as I see it,” Ginger says, with all the patience in the blessed world, “Don’t work yourself up over it, gal.”

Ginger smiles without any twist of malice. He looks like the old Ginger, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, the one who snuck cigs with Katya in the yard, who laughed whenever Katya decided to duck into a handstand on the way to the mess. Teased mercilessly after Katya got drunk on pruno and had Vovo Ivanovich poke n’ stick ****грация****  and ****достоинство****  onto her middle fingers. They're horrible tattoos but it's still kinda fun to see _Grace_  or _Dignity_  sliding in and out of somewhere naughty or flung into the air as an insult. 

It feels wrong to be saying their farewells while Katya’s up in drag, while the light’s so low—with Ginger, empty-handed, backing away. But it is what it is and people are what they are; and despite everything they’ve been through, there’s nothing left for them to say.

Ginger stubs out his cigarette with a pat of his sandals. He twirls the keys in his hand and backs away, rounding the hood of the car.  

“For the record,” Ginger calls out, with a smug shake of his head, “I wasn’t talkin’ about your relationship, Mitya....”

Frowning, Katya cocks her head.

“I was talking about _the work_."


	12. Cruelty-Free (Save Point)

Trixie wakes up slowly. He rubs his bleary eyes, burrowing deep into the pillow. The sun streams through the window overhead. The sea-breeze flutters the curtain, carrying the commotion of the tourists flocking to the beach.

It’s been a couple days since they met with Alaska. They’ve spent most of them flipping the cash: eating out at trendy bistros, visiting all the tourist traps, thrifting for second-hand treasures, twirling in front of tri-fold mirrors and spinning like idiots to make each other laugh. Yesterday, they wasted the whole afternoon sitting cross-legged on the floor, touching knees and giggling like little girls, while Trixie tried to paint Katya’s face in signature style. (The end result was terrifying—Katya rearing back from the mirror, gasping, “ _Jesus, Mary, Joseph!_ ”) And that same evening, they fucked like the last two apes on earth, not a care in the world.

This is Trixie’s last morning in this bed. He will never wake up in this shitty, squeaky box-spring again.

No more hiding. No more scrounging. No more Vespucci Beach.

His fingers turn inward, wanting to hold on a little tighter to the stained sheets. To everything. To the wonky spring in their hideous sofa and the hole in the wall that gets deeper and uglier each time Katya flies out of the bathroom and swings the doorknob into the cheap drywall.

He knows Katya’s gonna miss the water-stain blessing them from the far wall: the mutant, hunchback Jesus with his thin, Byzantine corona. The skinniest legend of them all. Trixie’s gonna miss him, too.

It’s...a real weird feeling.

Ever since childhood, he’s been stuck on the fantasy of Home Sweet Home, a gentle Hallmark paradise that’s always seemed like pie-in-the-sky. Up until recently, Trixie figured he’d sooner end up dead under a mattress in a drug den than ever live-out his Christmas cookie-tin dream.

Now, he’s got that golden ticket, latched and locked-up, sitting on the kitchen table. Their little bundle of joy. (And that’s just the half of it.) Soon enough, they’ll have nothing to worry about but each others’ happiness...and it’s a little daunting, if Trixie’s honest, even if it’s everything he’s ever hoped for.

After they finish The Job, they’re bound for Yankton, a little logging town on the Canadian border. Trixie picked it—because Katya agreed to trust his judgment in all things “oaky-smoky.” So, that’s the plan. Trixie’s just not sure if Katya realizes how removed they’ll be from modern society. They won’t want for anything...but it’ll be a different rhythm than what they’re used to. Especially Katya.

Katya’s always been a city-girl, through and through. City-life really suits him. In the city, there’s always a new path for Katya to discover. New things to taste, new ways to speak, new ways to feel good. There’s always someone new to talk to, someone new to look at.

And...Trixie’s kinda worried that he’s only got a handful of years before Katya wakes up beside him, knocking on forty, itching to do something wild again. Pick up a new accomplice off the side of road and blow out of there, like a shot in the dark, off on a brand new adventure.

Katya can’t promise he won’t wanna do that someday—and Trixie won’t ask him to.

He remembers being a kid, no more than seven, sitting cross-legged on the patio with juice stains around his mouth, playing with stubs of chalk. Beside him, his mother smoked a cigarette, rolling back and forth on a plastic rocking chair, staring at the lights of the nearby reservation at dusk. Her thick fingers trembled, bulging around her wedding ring; and the bruise along her cheek was beginning to yellow. He asked her about his dad. (Not Jim. His real one.) And she flinched, mad that he’d asked the question at all.

“Lemme tell you somethin’ about the women in our family,” she said to him, her chin doubling as she sucked on her cigarette, “All of us: me, your Aunt Janet, Nana Irene...We are doomed for those crazy boys. We capture ‘em for one perfect minute...a minute that can feel like so many good years, like nine months carryin’..and then one day, you get too comfortable, and you look away...and he’s fuckin’ gone. Running through the open gate, after some tall blonde hussy painted like _fuckin’ whore._ Miss Harvest Queen, Barbie Supreme.”

She sucked on her teeth, flicked her ash. “They’ve got a terrible power, those types of girls,” she said, nodding with some sad wisdom, a kind of awe, “You be careful of those types of girls.”

The grey, threaded through her hair, shimmered in the ruptured sunlight. She coughed a wicked cough, signaling what would eventually do her in. She kicked an empty beer can off the patio with her bare foot, her second toe longer than the rest, chipped with pink nail-polish. The rocking chair kept rocking, long after the screen-door snapped shut behind her.

When Trixie thinks of his mother, he usually thinks of that evening. Or that era of her life, at least. Sometimes, he recognizes her features in the mirror: her sharp eyes, her blunt nose, the resilient set of her lips. She was a strong woman—practical and sure-footed in just about everything, except for love; and sometimes, Trixie sees that in himself, too.

Whatever. At the end of the day, he’s gotta believe in the power of love. It’s the only thing he can believe in, because he _feels_ it, because it changes things.  If you can’t believe in love, why believe in anything at all?

Yawning, Trixie rubs his bleary eyes. He focuses on the solo cigarette burning in the ashtray on the table. Katya sits there with a bowl of cereal propped on his knee, curling his toes over the seat. His eyes are glued to their laptop (bumming Thorgy’s WiFi) and Trixie can hear soft grunts and groans coming from the speakers. Someone moans and Katya chuckles around a spoonful of cornflakes, watching porn like it’s a Saturday morning cartoon.

Trixie’s smiles. His bottom lip must be bruised because it hurts a little. His whole body feels drawn-out like warm taffy, deeply-rested, screwed-sore. No doubt he’s got a hickey (or three) below-the-belt somewhere. He can’t complain.

Katya swirls his iced-coffee, glancing over at the bed. Seeing him awake, Katya grins, his eyes squinting a little as he takes a sip. It’s love in a look and it warms Trixie all over.

“ _Bonjour. Je suis amoureux,”_ Katya husks before he pauses, the cogs turning in his head, amending, “ _Amoureuse._ _Je suis une femme_.”

For all Trixie knows, he could be saying he likes to lick toads. So, he chuckles in response, “...Yeah. Me too.”

Katya likes that. “ _Ty moy ray, ty moyo nebo. Ty moyo solntse. Nama ga ii_.”

By sound alone, Trixie can recognize the Russian for what it is (rather than what it means) but the other bit....

“Was that Japanese? Do you speak Japanese now? When did you learn Japanese?”

Katya shrugs, looking smug.

(Always something new.)

Trixie swings his legs over the bed, rummaging for the sweats he tossed to the floor the night before. He fits his head and arms through his favorite tank: The one with the wolf. That’s a good one.

It’s after ten o’clock. He can’t remember the last time he slept in so late. Not that he minds. He feels amazing. But they’ve got a lot to get done today.

Reconnaissance, for one. Katya’s already scouted out a flophouse (The Historic Hotel Serena) right across the row from Detox’s party palace in Ganton. And honestly? Trixie was hoping they’d be out of Vespucci before noon.

“Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“Didn’t have the heart,” Katya apologizes, staring at the screen with a devilish little grin, “...And I _like_ watching you sleep.”

“That’s not weird at all.”

“You needed it,” Katya says, seriously this time, with a flurry of his hands, “Look at you now! Radiant. My heart’s beating a mile a minute, you stud.”

“ _Hey_!” Trixie says, cheeks warm as he shuffles toward the kitchenette, “Treat me worse next time. It’s what I’m used to.”

Katya munches down on another spoonful. The metal _shings_ against his teeth as he pulls it out clean. Trixie shakes a box of stale cornflakes and pours out the last helping, splashing it with milk: the last crappy breakfast. They’re gonna buy the good stuff, now. The kinda stuff that eases the conscious, one forkful at a time: local free-range organic. He’ll be able to eat vegetarian again. _Cruelty-free_. A nice change of pace.

Behind him, Katya chuffs out a laugh. He’s still staring at the screen, completely absorbed. An actor moans an exaggerated “ _Dude_!” like he’s in a ‘90s surfer flick and…Trixie just needs to know.

(He won’t judge: One of his tried-and-trues is a gangbang with Slader Steele dressed as Jason Voorhees, so...that’s _his_ life and his reality.)

Taking a bite, Trixie peeks over Katya’s shoulder and _sees_ it.

Oh. Wow.

Okay.

“Are you....?” Trixie cackles. “Is that... _Ninja Turtles_?!”

He slides into the other seat as Katya grabs the edge of the screen, pivoting the laptop in his direction.

“Don’t knock it ‘till ya try it,” he says with a sly smile, grabbing his coffee and swirling the half-melted ice.

Trixie scoops up his cereal, watching Raphael dick down Michelangelo while Master Splinter pulls the padge. They’re even in a sewer, an open box of pizza forgotten in the background.

Trixie laughs. “Oh my God.”

“Does it _tickle your pickle,_ Tina Marie?”

“I don’t hate it,” he admits with a wide smile.

“I mean...Cowabunga _,_ “ Katya says, as if it explains everything--and Trixie laughs, because it actually does.

“I was trying to look up places in the Grand Senora where we can lay low after the delivery,” Katya explains, emphasizing with his hands, “Cash-only, rent-by-the-hour dumps. You know the drill.”

He pulls the laptop back his way. The porn goes mute.

Trixie nods, taking a crunch from his spoon. “Yeah. And?”

“Slim pickins. There is _nothing_ out there.”

“Fuck.”

“ _Yeah_.”

It’ll be a problem if they can’t find a suitable hideout for a few days. After the hit, they’ve gotta let the manhunt cool off a little before they boost another ride and punch it North. Plus, who knows what kind of injuries they might sustain after all this....

Alaska tried to make the Op sound like a piece of cake, but Trixie knows better. If it was nothing, she wouldn’t be shelling out a cool 1.5 million to have it done. This isn’t one of their usual hit-and-runs. This is a prolonged, time-sensitive campaign with a lot of moving parts and unpredictable variables. They’re not gonna go unnoticed, not while they’re driving through the night in a sparkling Överflöd Roxxxy. They’re gonna draw heat from all sides.

Taking out Detox is gonna be like kicking a hornet’s nest and Trixie’s always hated bees.

He can recall a _real fluffy_ moment when he was little: tearing-up as he teetered on top of a ladder, protected by nothing but a pair of rubber gloves as Jim jostled the leg and barked at him to tear that “goddamn wasp cone” out of the soffit. (The end result was...as you would expect.)

This job is gonna be something like that. It’s gonna be tough. Maybe their toughest ever.

 _Definitely_ their toughest ever.

It’s worth it, though, right? It’ll be worth it.

They can do it.

(Chinatown.)

They can do anything.

(Just don’t think about Chinatown.)

He knows they can.

(It won’t happen again.)

Trixie feels a sting in his gut, thinks for a minute that if he reaches down, he’ll be able to feel the nebulous impact bruise where he was shot. When his spoon scrapes against the bottom of the bowl, he can hear the crushed bullet clattering into the sink. He can see it in his hand.

(What happened in Chinatown will _not_ happen again.)

He’s gotta focus on the future: tuning his guitar on a crisp autumn night, hearing the hoot of an owl after dessert, seeing Katya’s breath as he laughs in the fresh snow.

Trixie chews slow, rotating his spoon over the bowl and watching the milk drip, trying not to see blood.

“...The only place remotely close to Alaska’s rendezvous point is this trailer park,” Katya mumbles, reading the screen, “Shady Shores.”

Wait. Hold on.

“We don’t have to stay at a motel,” Trixie declares, feeling triumphant as he taps his spoon against the bowl, “I know somebody who lives out there.”

“You do? _Who_?”

“Oh, just A.J,” he replies with a shrug, “But if we cut him a grand or two, it won’t be a problem. We can crash there for a few days.”

Katya’s stare is _blank,_ having registered nothing that Trixie’s just said...at all.

“Who’s A.J.?” Katya asks, purposefully light and airy. Oblivious. There’s an unsettling innocence in the way his eyes are so open and inquisitive, his smile so hesitant.

And then it dawns on Trixie: He never bothered to tell Katya about A.J.

Oh, my God. Now, _that’s_ funny.

Trixie flops back against the chair, laughing a little as Katya squirms around, waiting for an answer. For a sec, Trixie’s tempted to lie.

“My uh...I guess my boyfriend?”

“Huh.”

“Before you and I met up again.”

Katya blinks and then laughs loud. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t remember you telling me about him _at all_.”

“I don’t ever think I told you,” Trixie blurts out, regretting it when he sees Katya’s face fall a little bit.

“Oh.” Katya sits straighter in the chair.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to like…” He reaches for Katya’s hand. “...blindside you or anything.”

“No, it’s okay. I never asked. I never asked about anybody,” Katya says then, his face contemplative. He stares off into space and pulls his hand away, crunching down on a cube of ice, “I can’t believe I never asked.”

“Mitya...I’ve never asked you about any of your exes, either,” Trixie points out. He’s actually...deliberately avoided the subject.

“Yeah. Yeah,” Katya concedes, mulling it over before he smiles, slow and evil, a twinkle in his eye, “Well, you already _killed_ one of ‘em, Bessie.”

Trixie crows with laughter. It’s a private, shameless cackle  that only Katya wouldn’t judge him harshly for. With one swing, he guaranteed Officer Asshole a closed-casket funeral...and he’s never been able to feel entirely bad about it.

“But does he really count?” Trixie says, just to be a bitch, just to spit on his grave, “I mean...did he _ever_?”

“God, no,” Katya scoffs, crossing himself,  “Rest in fucking pieces, motherfucker.”

Trixie glances at the brutal nail-studded bat propped in the corner of the apartment: Barbarian Barbie’s very own pussy-pink, Malibu mace. The paint job’s going a little dull and there are places where the blood has gone to rust, slivers of aluminum glinting in the morning light like wisps of spider silk.

If Katya’s ever noticed that Trixie’s bat is the same brand as the one currently rusting at the bottom of the Humboldt River, he’s never mentioned it.

Trixie rarely uses it in the field. It’s not practical. It makes a mess. (Neither of those things have ever stopped Katya from strapping thirteen knives to hidden areas on her body...but that’s where they’ve agreed to disagree, where they differ in their _approach_.)  But, Trixie has to admit, there have been plenty of extortion jobs that have gone quite smoothly with Katya straddling some sad sack-of-shit while Trixie twirls that big, spiked slugger behind her like a majorette gone totally medieval.

There’s a perverse enjoyment in watching a man with more money than God whimpering at the edge of Katya’s knife, pissing himself when she spins a demented little yarn about how she’s gonna need the code to his personal safe or she’s gonna “rip the flesh off his bones and fuck it.” There’s something to promising that same man he’s gonna live when he’s not gonna make it through the next hour. There’s always been something about it, a horrific satisfaction that Trixie first tasted with the bat in his hand, being Katya’s fag-in-shining-armor.

It’s a little fucked up. Okay, it’s more than fucked up...but Trixie figures: So is he. So is Katya. So is _Everything._

It’s not just people’s way. He’d like it if it were, but Trixie’s seen a cat savage her entire litter only to leave the corpses behind to harden in the October chill. He’s seen stray dogs, ears bloated with fat green ticks, kill over barren stretches of land to piss on. It’s nature’s way. That’s just how it is—and it is _everywhere._

Katya drums his fingers against the table. “And you know for certain A.J.’s still living out there?”

“Oh, yeah,” Trixie says, nodding with certainty.

When Trixie first met A.J., he was managing the bowling alley down in Cypress Flats, acting mostly as a fence. A.J.’s ‘crew’ used to bum around in the back room all day, stoned and stuffing their faces with Up-n-Atom Burger, marathoning _Sailor Moon_ from dawn to dusk. When Momo’s mom died, she left him a trailer in Shady Shores...and surprise, surprise: a mattress stuffed with cash. A.J. was so amped to kick-back and hole-up with his friends. He was gonna save money, focus on his rap ‘career,’ cut a demo...the whole bit.

He’s definitely still up there, doing none of those things.

“And you trust him?” Katya asks, slurping the last of his ice coffee. When Katya crunches down on an ice cube, Trixie winces, feeling it through his own teeth. (What do they call that? A sympathy pain?)

“Yeah. Enough. He’s never cared for the Squirrelfriends...or cops. Loves money.”

“Don’t we all,” Katya says, finishing off with a loud burp. 

“Okay,” Trixie says, patting the table, eager to put-it-to-bed, “I’ll get in touch then.”

“Okay.”

Katya’s smile is tight, even a little tense, but he’ll get over it. He’ll see.

In a very strange way, Trixie kinda owes his ex-boyfriend for his current _squeeze_. After all, A.J. was the one who wanted to show Trixie ‘an authentic Southside drag race,’ as if t were any different on one side of the country versus the other, and dragged Trixie out to Grove Street. (It wasn’t much of a race. The first-place car finished well before the others.) Trixie stood at the finish line guzzling his third beer while A.J. chatted up some big guy with gold teeth, and then just about swallowed his tongue when he saw that beautiful sleazeball from Liberty City exit the second-place car.

He got whiplash from how quickly his life changed again. The world revolved when he saw Katya again. In an instant, everything was somehow different.

Trixie mumbled something about needing to piss and...that was the last he saw of A.J. until a week or two later when he swung by to collect his stuff, pink lipstick stained around his mouth and a wild look in his eye, hell-bent on getting in, getting out, and getting back to the crazy idiot sitting beside him now.

Even though Trixie fully _ghosted_ on him that night, A.J. didn’t seem too bent out of shape over it. Didn’t begrudge him for wanting a change. He always thought of Trixie as more simple-hearted and well-meaning than he actually was.

Time to use that to his advantage.

Trixie shifts the laptop back his way, opening another tab to the innocuous-looking blue-and-white interface of LifeInvader, logging into the dummy profile that will surely outlast his own time on the planet. He types in A.J.’s name and sure enough: his address in Sandy Shores and his current location on GPS. (Thirty minutes ago, he checked into The 24-Hour Chinese Restaurant on Alhambra Drive.) And right there in bold font: His cell number. Trixie takes a minute to memorize the address, then the nine digits, before he reaches to snap the laptop closed. He pauses, catching A.J.’s profile picture: That’s Blaine County alright. A quarry from the looks of it. But A.J. and his friends are dressed like it’s Spring Break in Cancun, bright colors and stupid sunglasses, hanging all over each other and laughing. Everyone looks happy.

He shuts the computer.

Katya gets up from the table, leaving his empty bowl. Usually, Trixie hates that. But it’s not like it matters if they do the dishes now, does it?

Passing behind him, Katya runs a warm hand along his shoulders, placing a burner phone on the table and Trixie mutters a “Thanks,” weighing the cell in his palm. His thumb floats over the keypad, miming A.J.’s number before he thinks better of actually dialing it. He’s not gonna call right now.

He will. Just not right now.

“Do we have Thorgy’s envelope ready?” Trixie asks, if only for a change of subject.

“Locked and loaded,” Katya confirms, swishing up a white envelope from the bedside table and biting down on the stack. They’ve filled the sleeve with what they owe, plus next month’s rent. It should keep Thorgy from sniffing around for a little while.

By the time he discovers that they’ve skipped town, he can sell whatever is leftover here. Maybe make a small buck. Probably not. Nobody else but them would see any value in a lumpy cum-stained mattress, a rickety card table, and a sofa with a bad spring.

All of this, their home, will probably end up in landfill somewhere….

And there’s that real weird feeling again, of preemptively missing their rock-bottom...Trixie watches Katya stand beside the window, absently wringing out his clothes, airing them out with a firm shake, watching the people milling around outside. Trixie would bet their entire score that Katya’s feeling it, too.

Within the next half hour, Trixie clips on some black overalls and pulls on a beanie, brushes his teeth, gargles some tap. Out of the bathroom, he grabs the pressure gun and screwdriver that Katya’s laid out for him while packing the go-bag. Trixie’s guitar case is open, really open, with all her secret compartments exposed and the components of Trixie’s rifle gleaming in the late morning sun. Linda’s a real charmer with her clean lines and silver accents, her hot pink scope and the flowers engraved into her polished cherry wood stock. There’s a grim tally hashed against her hand-guard. She really drops ‘em.

Trixie can’t wait to assemble her again, adjust her sights one last time.

“Stick close to the canal,” Katya advises, dutifully sorting out ammo and stashing magazines into the drawer of Trixie’s make-up case. Without looking away, Katya leans over for a quick kiss goodbye and Trixie pecks him on the lips, more out of habit more than anything else. He hates that.

“Mitya.”

“Hmm?”

Katya looks back and Trixie gives him another kiss, harder and longer, holding Katya’s jaw in his hands, feeling that little rumbling noise that Katya makes whenever they _really_ kiss. Like a blushing bride. Like the purr of an engine. It always drives him crazy.

He remembers the first time Katya held him, his pink skin flushed with pearls of sweat, his eyes low and blue and dreamy as he looked down at him, smoking a cigarette with a big, mesmerizing smile. He nuzzled into Trixie’s shoulder, rasped into his ear, “Y’wanna do something _really_ fun?” And in that moment, shuddering against him, Trixie would’ve let Katya ash on the flat of his tongue if he asked. He would’ve _thanked_ him. So, he said _yes_. He kept on saying _yes, yes, yes…._

“I love you,” Trixie says, pulling away, “You know that, right?”

“I love you, too,” he responds softly, looking younger somehow, looking sweet in his own odd way.

Then, Katya pulls back, tapping his ass. “ _Now, go hitch us a fuckin’ ride, you low-down termagant,”_ he growls, “ _Let’s get this show on the road!_ ”

“I’ll be an hour tops,” Trixie says, heading toward the door, “Be ready. I’m serious.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Katya says, shooing at him, “Go. I’ll be ready.”

Resolved, Trixie steps toward the door. His hand is on the knob when he notices a carving in the frame that wasn’t there before: M + W enclosed in a crooked little heart. The letters look good together, like they could slot together, mirrored against each other.

Trixie glances over his shoulder but Katya’s not paying attention to him as he roots his fingers through the tangle of a dirty-blonde wig, shaking it out. Trixie touches the carving. For good luck, maybe, and lets his fingertips glide over the rough lines.

Trixie sticks to the canal, just like Katya suggested. Within a half hour of walking the beat,  he scopes out a basic piece-of-shit Glendale with a manual lock parked against the curb, riding on a spare. Checking his peripheral, Trixie confidently approaches the car, pulling on a pair of gloves as he angles his shoulder into the driver-side door, shielding the pressure gun he’s got pressed against the lock. He pulls the trigger and the metal cylinder rockets across the cabin of the car, ricocheting off the opposite door.

Like taking candy from a baby.

He hooks a finger through the hole in driver door and yanks it open, tossing the beaded seat cover in the back before he makes short work of the wires running beneath the steering column. Jamming the shaved screwdriver into the ignition, Trixie turns over the engine and hears it rattling for oil as he revs the gas. Not the best, but it’ll do.

He pulls a U, punching it back home.

As he pulls into the lot, Trixie honks at Katya, watching him toss their now-busted laptop into the dumpster. Katya rushes over with the go-bag slung over one shoulder and two duffels in hand, sliding them in the backseat before skittering back to the dumpster to grab Trixie’s guitar case. He slides into the passenger side, slamming the door shut with a big huff of breath and a wide grin.

In LS traffic, Trixie figures the drive from Vespucci Beach to Ganton will only take a half-hour; but…Best laid plans, right? Within the first ten minutes, Trixie’s already stalled at a light in Idlewood, fiddling with the radio, adjusting the sun visor—but he can’t get a signal in this piece of crap car and the visor won’t swivel the direction he wants and….

“Baby, it is taking _everything_ inside of me not to fully pop the curb and fly through this intersection like a fucking….”

Trixie glances over. Katya’s fast asleep. Talk about a caffeine crash.

He figures Katya must’ve gotten up during the night and never come back to bed. Like he does sometimes. He’s always been real weird about his sleeping habits, even before all the bad blood with the Squirrelfriends. It’s always been in short restless bursts, like four-hour shifts. Even in his sleep, he doesn’t like to keep still. No wonder being bounced around in a moving car is like popping an Ambien. Or four.

Katya’s head rests against the door jamb. The sunlight divides his face, smooth and slack. Traffic starts moving again, slowly, and the movement jostles Katya around. His forehead knocks against the window with a thud, but he doesn’t react in the slightest. He looks lifeless. He looks….

Fingers tightening around the wheel, Trixie can’t help but think of those macabre Victorian parlor photos: the ones of dead people posed as if they’re only sleeping. His stomach turns a little sour, stirring in panic, and he selfishly wants to wake Katya up, just to have him _up_ and _vibrant_ —chattering at him and smiling at him and laughing at whatever stupid thing he says.

Tearing the beanie off his head, he looks away instead: _God, focus, Trixie._

He can _not_ be thinking about this shit right now.

Trixie snatches up the phone resting in the cup-holder, trading one discomfort for another as he dials A.J.’s number. He swallows the lump in his throat and he listens to it ring.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I am not a polyglot; soooo, I tried to research for accuracy but idk. I'll save you a trip to Google. This is the French, Russian, and Japanese, respectively: Good morning, I am in love. I am in love. I am a woman. // You are my paradise, my heaven. You are my sun. Let’s do it bareback.)

**Author's Note:**

> _If you’d like to throw hands, or whateva, I’m on Tumblr—because of course I am, right—@vrginsacrifice._


End file.
